This post contains frank discussion of plot points from Avengers: Endgame.

When Black Panther received seven Oscar nominations earlier this year—and went on to win three of them—it seemed immediately clear that this would be the exception, not the rule, for Marvel films going forward. A director-driven, visually inventive spectacle that brought together some of the world’s best black actors, and introduced some new ones, Black Panther felt less like a franchise installment than a passion project, unlike most Marvel movies that came both before and after. When Ant-Man and the Wasp opened a few months later, no one gave it the serious Oscar buzz Black Panther was already drumming up; when Captain Marvel opened almost two weeks after the Oscars in February, its $1 billion-plus global gross was seen as reward enough.

For the most part, Avengers: Endgame is likely to follow this same awards pattern. The Oscars don’t particularly love superhero movies, including Marvel Studios movies, which had failed to win a single award until Black Panther. The massive conclusion to the Avengers saga (or, at least, this iteration of it) will likely receive the same sort of Oscar campaign that Infinity War did—for-your-consideration screeners that promote the film in a wide range of categories, some it’s likely to succeed in (best visual effects, sure), and others, not as much. (Sorry, best-director hopefuls Joe and Anthony Russo.)

But there may be one major exception this time: Robert Downey Jr. As the actor with the most significant emotional arc in Endgame, handed scenes of immense drama and plenty of trademark Tony Stark quips, Downey is the logical actor to pick out of the massive ensemble for a supporting-actor campaign, much as Michael B. Jordan was for Black Panther. But unlike Jordan, Downey has had 11 years to cement his character in the pop-culture consciousness, taking audiences on a journey from the selfish genius of Iron Man to the father in Endgame trying to save the world without wiping his daughter out of existence.

(For more on Avengers: Endgame and the Oscars, listen to this week’s Little Gold Men podcast.)

Cast as Iron Man as he was climbing out of a well-publicized period of drug addiction that made him virtually impossible to hire, Downey indelibly linked his own irresistible comeback story to Marvel’s rise. As he told Vanity Fair in 2014, “I’ve gone from being convinced that I am the sole integer in the approbation of a phenomenon to realizing that I was the lead in the first of a series of movies that created a chain reaction that, if everything didn’t fire the way it was supposed to, there’s no operator, no anything. And you go, O.K., life is doing something here that included me but did not require me. But, yes, that role means a lot. Marvel is kind of like this sacred brotherhood.”