When Jodi Foster put disgraced film star and her longtime friend Mel Gibson in her 2011 film, The Beaver, there was a sense around Hollywood that his casting had come too soon. Just five years earlier, thanks to his drunken, anti-Semitic, misogynistic rants, Gibson had burned nearly every bridge in town. Gibson has laid low in the years since, taking some oddball and villainous roles in action throwbacks like Machete Kills and The Expendables 3. But when his first directorial effort in ten years, Hacksaw Ridge, got a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival last year, it was a sign that maybe Gibson’s peers were ready to welcome him home. And when that same movie started landing nomination after nomination for both Gibson and star Andrew Garfield, it became clear that Hollywood is now ready to forgive and forget. A little over a decade after his infamous Los Angeles arrest, Gibson is having the best week of his life.

Exactly one week ago, Mel Gibson was nominated for only his second directing Oscar ever. An acting nomination for his star, Andrew Garfield, seemed like a sure thing. But many predictors thought Lion’s Garth Davis or even Denzel Washington for Fences and Martin Scorsese for Silence would fill the category’s fifth directing nomination slot, which ultimately went to Gibson. Earlier this season, Gibson had been shut out of the Director’s Guild of America nominations, and the entire awards campaign for Hacksaw Ridge has tentatively tiptoed around The Gibson Problem. “I want to specifically thank Mel Gibson, a truly great storyteller and a beauty, beauty, beauty of a man,” Garfield said when accepting an award at the Palm Springs Film Festival—before adding, “as far as I know him.”

That caveat served as the same kind of verbal kid glove that Gibson’s few allies have been using for a decade. “I think I know Mel, in his heart, and I think he’s not the way he’s been characterized,” Gibson’s Lethal Weapon co-star Danny Glover told Vanity Fair in 2011. His supporters, though constant, have always been a bit cautious.

But it seems that Oscar nominations—not just for his film and his star, but also for Gibson himself—are a ticket back into the inner circle of Hollywood. In other words, the kid gloves are off—and Gibson is reportedly circling the Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg sequel Daddy’s Home 2. It would be a very normalizing role for the actor, as well as his first turn in a full-blown comedy since 2000’s What Women Want.

Building off the bonhomie clearly on display at the Golden Globes earlier this month, Gibson and another Hacksaw Ridge actor, Vince Vaughn, have also signed on to co-star in cop thriller Dragged Across Concrete, written and directed by Bone Tomahawk’s S. Craig Zahler. Deadline has the description: