Tom Cruise finally received an Oscar on Sunday night in Los Angeles \u2013 though not for a specific acting role. The star of Top Gun, Jerry Maguire and the Mission: Impossible series was given an honorary Academy Award at the annual Governors awards, which are designed to reward lifetime achievement.<\/p>\n
In a statement before the event<\/a>, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Ampas) president Janet Yang cited \u201cCruise\u2019s incredible commitment to our film-making community, to the theatrical experience, and to the stunts community has inspired us all\u201d. Recalling his efforts to shoot the seventh Mission: Impossible in 2020<\/a>, Yang added that Cruise \u201chelped to usher the industry through a challenging time during the Covid-19 pandemic\u201d.<\/p>\n Cruise, who was previously nominated for best actor Oscars<\/a> for Born on the Fourth of July and Jerry Maguire, and best supporting actor for Magnolia, described first falling in love with the medium, saying: \u201cI remember that beam of light just cut across the room. I remember looking up and seeing the image just exploding on the screen, and suddenly the world was so much larger than the one that I knew. Entire cultures, lives, landscapes. It sparked a hunger, a hunger for adventure, a hunger for knowledge, a hunger to understand humanity, to create characters, to tell a story.\u201d<\/p>\n Cruise was introduced by Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu, who is working with the actor<\/a> on an as yet untitled film due for release in 2026. Saying that \u201cwriting a four-minute speech to celebrate Tom Cruise\u2019s 45-year career is what is known in this town as Mission: Impossible\u201d, I\u00f1\u00e1rritu then described the actor\u2019s work as \u201cmeticulously choreographed\u201d but feeling \u201ccompletely improvised, structured like a clockwork, but flowing like gas\u201d. His onscreen intensity, I\u00f1\u00e1rritu said, was also present off screen: he once witnessed Cruise downing chilli peppers \u201clike they were popcorn\u201d, while \u201cI, a proud Mexican, was crying with just one bite\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThis may be his first Oscar, but from what I have seen and experienced, it will not be the last,\u201d I\u00f1\u00e1rritu added. Standing next to Cruise, he said, you \u201cstart to wonder if the rest of us belong to a completely different, rapidly decaying species\u201d.<\/p>\n Cruise with Oscar-winning film director Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu, who presented the award. Photograph: Chris Pizzello\/Invision\/AP<\/p>\n The Academy also paid tribute to Dolly Parton, awarding an honorary Oscar to \u201cone of the few people that remains in this world that everyone loves\u201d. Parton, who has recently had health concerns<\/a> that forced the postponement of a Las Vegas residency, was not able to attend the event \u2013 but her friend Lily Tomlin was on hand to celebrate the humanitarian work that earned Parton the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian award.<\/p>\n \u201cThe soul, the heart of Dolly, it is so good and so true,\u201d Tomlin told an audience of A-listers at the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Hollywood. \u201cShe has fake nails, fake hair \u2013 but she is the most authentic person I have ever known.\u201d<\/p>\n Parton \u2013 who has previously been nominated for two best song Oscars \u2013 launched the Dollywood Foundation in 1988 to support education<\/a> in her home county in Tennessee. Seven years later, she launched a book donation programme that eventually went international. She has also supported disaster relief efforts, including giving $1m last year to Hurricane Helene recovery, and has helped fund Covid vaccine research.<\/p>\n \u201cMy mom and dad showed me that the more you give, the more blessings come your way,\u201d Parton said in a prerecorded acceptance speech. \u201cAnd I\u2019ve been blessed more than I ever dreamed possible.\u201d The award, she said, \u201cmakes me want to dream up new ways to help lift people up. And isn\u2019t that what we\u2019re supposed to be here for?\u201d Her message was followed by a powerful rendition of Parton\u2019s song Jolene by the singer Andra Day.<\/p>\n The Governors awards are a reception and dinner that act as a kind of curtain-raiser for the Oscars, with many of its attendees among the hopefuls in this year\u2019s race. The mood is typically relaxed and jovial; it probably helps that the ceremony isn\u2019t televised, and is largely confined to entertainment industry insiders \u2013 and everyone already knows who will be going home with statuettes. (This year\u2019s honorees were announced in June.) Each of the evening\u2019s recipients received a standing ovation from their peers.<\/p>\n Next to be honored was Wynn Thomas, a longtime production designer \u2013 in his words, the person who \u201ctakes the writer\u2019s words and turns them into concrete images\u201d \u2013 whose credits include Do the Right Thing, A Beautiful Mind, Malcolm X and Hidden Figures.<\/p>\n \u201cStepping into the world of Wynn Thomas is to find yourself in the hands of an imaginative artist, a meticulous and masterful film-maker, a trailblazer [who has] opened our eyes to new possibilities,\u201d said Octavia Spencer in a speech introducing Thomas \u2013 who, she noted, was the first Black production designer to join the art directors guild. His films, she said, \u201cportray a vibrant range of Black life, and that is by no means an accident\u201d. Thomas \u201chasn\u2019t just changed the way Black lives are shown in movies, he has changed the lives of Black artists in the entire industry.\u201d<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Take a front seat at the cinema with our weekly email filled with all the latest news and all the movie action that matters<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Cruise, Debbie Allen and Wynn Thomas. Photograph: Gilbert Flores\/Variety\/Getty Images<\/p>\n In his acceptance speech, Thomas reflected on his childhood in West Philadelphia. \u201cThere were street gangs and poverty everywhere, and to escape that world, I immersed myself in books,\u201d he said. \u201cI would sit on my front stoop and I would travel around the world. Now the local gangs looked down on me and called me sissy. But that sissy grew up to work with some great directors.\u201d<\/p>\n Cynthia Erivo paid tribute to the actor, dancer, choreographer, director and producer Debbie Allen, who has a long list of credits that include Fame, Amistad, the sitcom A Different World, and choreographing many Academy Awards ceremonies. \u201cTo know Miss Debbie is to know that she refuses to let dreams fade,\u201d Erivo said. She recounted how an initial rejection from the North Carolina School of the Arts ultimately led to Allen\u2019s five-decade career on screen and behind the scenes.<\/p>\n For her part, Allen reflected on the people who helped her along the way, including her parents, \u201cwho raised their children believing that we were citizens of the universe and that there were no boundaries, and that anything we could see, we could be\u201d. She added: \u201cMovies helped us see a lot of things. And we were faced with brick walls and glass ceilings and \u2018White Only\u2019 signs everywhere. But we grew up believing in ourselves.\u201d The award, Allen said, would be a reminder \u201cnot of what I\u2019ve done, but what I get, mean and have to do\u201d.<\/p>\n The final words of the night belonged to Cruise. Film, he said, reveals: \u201cour shared humanity, how alike we are in so, so many ways. No matter where we come from, in that theatre, we laugh, we feel together, we heal together, and that is the power of cinema. So making films is not what I do; it is who I am.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tom Cruise finally received an Oscar on Sunday night in Los Angeles \u2013 though not for a specific…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":139789,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-139788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139788\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/139789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}