If you ask us, Robert Pattinson officially arrived in Hollywood when "Twilight" won five Golden Popcorn statues at the 2009 MTV Movie Awards — including RPattz's nods for Best Kiss, Best Fight and Breakthrough Male Performance. But others might argue his Tinseltown coming-out party occurred a few months earlier.
In late February '09, after a weeklong series of rumors had whipped the Twi-nation into a frenzy, Pattinson walked onto an Academy Awards red carpet for the first time. He was not there because he was nominated, but simply because the Academy could not ignore the vampire phenomenon that had ignited the box office — and too many tween hearts to count — the previous fall. It was the biggest night in Hollywood, after all, and its biggest new star just had to be there. Not that he could quite wrap his head around the idea.
"It's insane," Pattinson exclaimed when we caught up with him on the carpet. "When they first told me about this, I was like, 'No, no, no, no, no, you're joking' — or 'I'm going to have to do something really stupid like get gunged!' "
Assuming he'd need to get doused with slime to justify an Oscars appearance, for that reason alone, this awards-season moment deserves to make our countdown of favorite Pattinson moments before the debut of "MTV First: Robert Pattinson" at 8:56 p.m. ET on Friday. But RPattz's self-deprecating humor aside, it was at the Oscars that his status as the rising young actor in town was solidified.
During the ceremony, he took the stage alongside Amanda Seyfried to present a montage of the year's romantic films, everything from "Mamma Mia!" to "Revolutionary Road" to, yes, "Twilight." Yet even though footage from the film that made him a star played at the Oscars, he couldn't quite believe the situation.
"I'm so surprised that it worked out the way it did," he told us of becoming a crush-worthy Hollywood presence. "I was thinking the whole time, 'I don't really have the personality to fit into that.' I'm not really afraid of it. I don't even know how to play up that. I don't know if I could ever be cast in a heartthrob role, apart from 'Twilight,' which I didn't know was a heartthrob role."
