Minnie Driver Explains Her Sad Look As Matt Damon Accepted His 1998 Oscar

The actor revealed the real reason why she was frowning when "Good Will Hunting" won the original screenwriting award for Damon and Ben Affleck.
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Minnie Driver says her first Oscars experience was soured by the fact that she got dumped by Matt Damon not long before the award show.

Driver spoke about the evening while commenting on an Instagram video of Damon and Ben Affleck accepting the Original Screenplay award for “Good Will Hunting” in 1998.

While Damon and Affleck could barely contain their joy during their speech, Driver looked sullen when the camera cut to her.

The “Grosse Pointe Blank” star looked back on things with a laugh in a response captured by the Instagram account Comments by Celebs.

“My face,” she wrote along with a series of crying emojis and a red heart.

Minnie Driver shared the backstory about her sullen look at the 1998 Oscars in an Instagram comment.
Minnie Driver shared the backstory about her sullen look at the 1998 Oscars in an Instagram comment.
Instagram/Comments by Celebs

Explaining why she looked “so sad” in a reply to a fan, Driver said, “Matt had ended our relationship a few weeks before this, and was at the Oscars with his new gf... I was devastated.

“Wish I could have celebrated more as it was an amazing moment for all of us, and for this wonderful film!”

The exes met on the set of “Good Will Hunting” in 1997 and began dating.

Driver was reportedly surprised when Damon declared he was single during a January 1998 appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

Actor Minnie Driver appears at the Academy Awards on March 23, 1998.
Actor Minnie Driver appears at the Academy Awards on March 23, 1998.
Kevin Mazur via Getty Images

“I was with Minnie for a while, but we’re not really romantically involved anymore. We’re just really good friends,” he told Oprah, adding that the match just “wasn’t meant to be.”

Damon maintained he and Driver had split before his announcement, but she called his reveal “fantastically inappropriate” in an interview with the Los Angeles Times several months later.

Driver looked back at the relationship with mixed feelings in an interview with Entertainment Tonight last year, saying, “That was just a sweet romance that was just a sweet love affair in the center of all of that stuff, but had a combustible ending, which then became the focus.”

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