It’s Oscar Night 2016, and some stuffy Hollywood establishment nerd prepares to read out the winner for Best Picture. He straightens his monocle and opens the envelope, but can only sputter, “N-no! This can’t be!” Finally, he collects himself and, sighing, reads the winning title to a gasping crowd. Vin Diesel, already crowdsurfing his way to the stage, crows, “There’s nothing in the rulebook that says a Fast & Furious movie can’t win Best Picture!” Dame Judi Dench faints.
That’s the kind of scenario Diesel has in mind, according to Variety. Demonstrating a downright Heidecker-and-Turkingtonian sense for what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences deems worthy of a Best Picture Oscar, Diesel told Variety as part of a cover story interview that not only does he believe Furious 7 will be the “biggest movie in history,” but it will “probably win best picture at the Oscars, unless the Oscars don’t want to be relevant ever.”
As the smile on the interviewer’s face presumably gave way to a look of mild confusion, Diesel continued—regarding a movie featuring cars parachuting out of an airplane and then getting shot by a bus—“This will win best picture … There is nothing that will ever come close to the power of this thing.” He added that “the world won’t anticipate” how “emotionally powerful the movie is” and that former Universal studio chief Ron Meyer used to say that Fast 5 and Fast & Furious 6 would have been Best Picture contenders if they didn’t have numbers attached to their titles, a sentiment with which Diesel heartily agrees.