A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

I FELT LIKE A FIGHTER WHO HAD BEEN TRAINING FOR A TITLE BOUT THAT HAD NOT BEEN BOOKED YET:  Up until Iron Man, the biggest box office hit in which Robert Downey Jr. was involved was Rodney Dangerfield's Back to School. (For real.) He talks about his career turnaround with GQ this month, including whether he expects to ever receive an Oscar ("I, personally, would be shocked if we went to the end of the tape now and I didn't have at least one.... Look, even if I don't get one directly, eventually they're just going to have to give me one when I get old. So no matter how you slice it, I'm getting one,") and this:

"Here's the thing. At whatever point I'm done with [the Iron Man films], I'm going to have a bit of a crisis, because I probably haven't even fully ingested how much I've enjoyed it, how much it's meant. It so came out of kind of relative obscurity as this second-tier character from the Marvel universe, and I feel I was part of making it something more. But it also to me was just good filmmaking. It's funny, people will come up to me and go, 'Dude, how do you do it? How do you dress up and play these...?' While whatsisname is shooting the next David O. Russell or whatever, I'm, 'Here's the thing, you're either having a good time or a bad time, and you're either doing a good movie or a bad movie.' And I know one thing, which is that there is no guarantee that doing a movie you think is 'important' "—Downey enunciates the word important in a wonderfully withering way—"isn't going to be the worst piece of tripe I've ever had to sit through. Or that this kind of two-dimensional genre movie I'm doing isn't actually going to be thoroughly entertaining. Isn't that why you went to the movies to begin with? Whatever."