Are Honorary Academy Awards Respected?
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
The 12th Annual Governors Awards ceremony has been announced, and its winners were brought up along as well. Honorary awards are going to director, writer and actress Elaine May, and acting powerhouses Samuel L. Jackson and Liv Ullmann. Finally, these three names will have Oscars. Furthermore, Danny Glover is receiving the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. These winners get their Oscars well before the official Academy Awards each year, and these names will get their statues January 22nd, 2022 (so it won’t be any different). The only thing is: the winners of these awards aren’t actual Academy Award winners in the eyes of many, since they didn’t win in competition, and I want to ask why this is. Peter O’Toole — who famously didn’t win a competitive Oscar unfortunately — initially didn’t want his honorary award, since he considered himself still in fighting form, sure he could win his own in competition some day. Is this how he should have looked at this honour, though?
He’s not the only person who holds this view. When Ennio Morricone won an Academy Award for The Hateful Eight, it was a huge triumph, because he finally won an Oscar. Well, he actually won an honorary award a few years earlier, but it was nice to see him being celebrated for a contemporary score he worked on. I get the idea that it’s such a rush to see a talent being honoured in the moment, and that makes more of a splash than obvious names being congratulated in hindsight. Does that make lifetime achievement awards unimportant in comparison? Why should that have to be the case? Exhibit A is the idea that awards seasons exist. We all get caught up in the hype of certain films and/or film elements, and we try to play the odds on who will win (whether or not the award will even go to the most deserving person, who may or may not even be nominated). Wouldn’t that make awards on the spot a little less genuine?
Furthermore, even an Oscar lover like myself can admit that the Academy usually gets it wrong, and that the awards are fun but not the be-all-end-all of legacies. I’ll never forget the year that various winners of Academy Awards were brought up, but then the films that didn’t win Best Picture were brought up next (it may have been Steven Spielberg who brought these up, but I can’t remember or find the clip I’m reflecting on to be sure). The point is that some of the greatest films of all time, like Raging Bull and Citizen Kane, surpassed these awards seasons effortlessly. Isn’t this where the honorary award winners come into play? Shouldn’t we see legacy wins as, well, exactly what they are? The acknowledgement of legacies? Isn’t that better than a one-off award win in competition in a sense? There might not be any exhilaration here, but that doesn’t make these wins any weaker.
I think these wins should get more love, and part of that process starts with the Oscars themselves. The ceremony for these wins, again, is done on a different date. The Academy Awards for that year usually shows at least some clips of the ceremony and the speeches, but the last Oscars didn’t even bother to give these dues whatsoever. I don’t expect them to show the entire event, but maybe a little bit more appreciation would make sense. Many people were happy when figures like Jackie Chan, David Lynch, and Agnès Varda finally had trophies. Their work was recognized as a whole. This isn’t an honourable mention of any sort. This is a win for decades — hell, a lifetime — of success, innovation and artistry. No amount of awards season pushes can pull these off. I can guarantee that a large number of competitive winners won’t have these sort of lifetime achievements. I don’t mean to insinuate that these are better than competitive awards, but I think, all things considered, that these awards should at least hold the same weight. Samuel L. Jackson, Elaine May, Liv Ullmann, and Danny Glover are finally Academy Award winners. They just took the long way to get there.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.