Robert Downey Jr. Is the First ‘SNL’ Cast Member to Win an Oscar. Who’s Next?

It’s the kind of trivia that feels wrong, somehow: Robert Downey Jr. just became the first former Saturday Night Live cast member to win an Academy Award by taking home a little gold man for his supporting role in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. The fact that Downey, who was on the show for just one season, won for a decidedly non-comedic performance, in the midst of a career that includes comic, dramatic, and superheroic components, points to why this feels so strange: In nearly half a century of churn, SNL has been home to such a variety of performers that it feels like one if not many of them should have won an Oscar at some point in the past, even if we might know that it hasn’t been Adam Sandler.

That’s not to say it shouldn’t have been Adam Sandler; Punch-Drunk Love, Uncut Gems, and The Meyerowitz Stories all feature crucial and awards-worthy performances from the Sandman, and he wasn’t even nominated for any of them. But no one else in the prime of Sandler’s early-’90s era has scored so much as a nomination, either. This maybe isn’t shocking when you think about the film careers of figures like Phil Hartman and Chris Farley (tragically cut short), Mike Myers (spotty and self-steered), Dana Carvey (largely nonexistent), or Rob Schneider (Deuce Bigalow). But it is surprising that the most Oscar-successful SNL cast is, in fact, Downey’s crew – and that was true even before Downey’s win this week.

Downey himself had been nominated twice before, in the Best Actor category for 1992’s Chaplin, and in Supporting Actor for 2008’s Tropic Thunder (which coincided with his comeback performance in Iron Man; hell of a year he had there). His castmates in the ill-fated 1985-6 season of Saturday Night Live, which saw the non-triumphant return of Lorne Michaels after five seasons away, included Randy Quaid, who already had an Oscar nomination to his name for The Last Detail a decade earlier, and Joan Cusack, who would go on to receive two Best Supporting Actress nominations, for Working Girl (1988) and In & Out (1997). This means that one-third of the nine-player main Season 11 cast received an Oscar nom, with a total of six nominations between them – more than the rest of the SNL-related nominations combined.

Outside the apparently magical Season 11, during which the show was very nearly canceled for good, SNL has been something of a dead zone for the Academy. The vaunted first-five-years original cast has yielded just two nominations: Dan Aykroyd, for Driving Miss Daisy, and Bill Murray, for Lost in Translation. Eddie Murphy has one, of course, but only one, for Dreamgirls. For acting, that’s it: the Season 11 all-stars and those losers Murray, Aykroyd, and Murphy. Outside of acting, Kristen Wiig was nominated for co-writing the Bridesmaids screenplay, while first-season bit player George Coe actually joined the show as a nominee, having co-directed a Live Action Short nominee. Michael McKean spent a single season on the show as sort of a hasty Phil Hartman substitute during the show’s mid-’90s low point, and later received an Oscar nomination for co-writing a song from A Mighty Wind.

There have been close calls, both of alumni that got close to the Oscars, and Oscar honorees who almost feel like alumni. Tina Fey’s screenplay for Mean Girls was deservedly nominated in the adapted category at the WGA, but didn’t make it to the Oscars. Melissa McCarthy has been nominated several times, including for Wiig’s Bridesmaids, but while she is closely associated with the show, having hosted five times and made many additional guest appearances, she was never a cast member. Recent two-time winner Emma Stone has also hosted five times, and is married to former SNL staffer Dave McCary (and of course longtime staffer Colin Jost is married to a multiple nominee, though not yet a winner). One-season wonder Billy Crystal has certainly hosted the Oscars a number of times, and directed his costar David Paymer to a nomination in a movie actually called Mr. Saturday Night. But Crystal himself has been tragically overlooked, whether for directing Forget Paris, writing My Giant, or starring in Analyze This with Oscar-winner Robert De Niro.

But the show has been most successful in producing Oscar winners who hang out on the edges of the frame. Technically, Howard Shore, musical director on the show for its first five seasons, and Adam McKay, head writer for much of the Will Ferrell era, did make some on-camera appearances during their time on the show. But they weren’t official cast members – and they did both win Oscars, Shore for scoring the Lord of the Rings films and McKay for adapting The Big Short into a screenplay. McKay has also been nominated for Best Original Screenplay twice more (for Vice and Don’t Look Up), and for Best Director twice (for The Big Short and Vice). Adding in his producer’s nominations for Vice and Don’t Look Up, McKay has been nominated for a whopping seven Oscars – more than the total of the Season 11 cast members. So the most successful SNL people at the Oscars are, in order, Adam McKay; the cast of one of the show’s weakest seasons; and their old music guy from the 1970s.

Given the number of performances that were also nominated from Vice, it seems like the best bet for the next SNL alum seeking a nomination or the second-ever win would be to appeal to McKay for a part in his next movie – so maybe that gives Cheri Oteri a leg up. Really, in terms of who the next SNL alum to actually win might be, it’s hard to tell. Bill Murray seems to have mostly given up on going after those marquee-style parts, and really, if he can’t even get a nomination for Rushmore, Broken Flowers, or The Life Aquatic, then what are we doing here? He and Murphy were each famously disappointed when they didn’t win, and post-Dreamgirls Murphy has alternated long breaks with revisiting of old material. Lots of people will watch Beverly Hills Cop 4 on Netflix, but it’s not going to win him an Academy Award. Besides, Bowfinger proved he could give a career-best performance and receive almost zero awards attention for it.

So forget legacy cast members and assume they’ve made peace with receiving their Honorary Oscars sometime in the early 2030s. Who from the 21st century might follow Downey to become the second SNL-alum Oscar winner? Cecily Strong has, so far, seemed more interested in the stage than film. Kate McKinnon tends to go pretty broad in her movie work, and the kind of more subdued, darkly funny performance from outsized talents like hers (think Molly Shannon in Year of the Dog) isn’t necessarily the Academy’s cup of tea. My one-man campaign for whatever Will Forte does next will probably not be enough.

We turn, then, to Bill Hader – not necessarily for acting (though he’s quite good in The Skeleton Twins) but for something behind the scenes. Hader’s magnum opus so far has been the TV show Barry – but it was made with such exactitude that fans almost immediately started buzzing about what Hader would be able to do with a movie. He’s a huge movie geek – the kind of demo that tends to be rewarded by a Best Original Screenplay Oscar, alongside actors who write. Maybe the latter was bigger in the ’90s, but still: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Billy Bob Thornton, Kenneth Branagh, and Emma Thompson all have screenwriting Oscars. Hader may be the show’s best shot.

As far as acting, though: It’s all up to you, Pete Davidson.