The Governors Awards, which takes place Saturday night at the Grand Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland, is now a real Oscar show:
Jack will be there.
I’ve confirmed that Jack Nicholson, Steven Spielberg, Alec Baldwin and Peter Fonda will join a handful of previously announced participants -- including Tom Hanks, Kirk Douglas, Annette Bening and Quentin Tarantino -- in saluting honorary Oscar winners Lauren Bacall, Roger Corman and Gordon Willis and Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award recipient John Calley.
Stars and legends will walk the red carpet, shiny new Academy Awards statuettes will be handed out … and it’ll take place in front of the smallest audience to see Oscars bestowed in more than half a century.
The ceremony, set in a scaled-down configuration of the same room in which the Governors Ball is held after each Oscar show, is an experiment -- and a risk, on many fronts.
It’s the first Academy event of its kind, a dramatic departure from the usual practice of handing out honorary Oscars on the main Academy Awards show.
It’s a dinner, not a television show, with footage that’ll be available online but no live TV feed.
And it’s the controversial result of an attempt to give out more honorary Oscars, unfettered by the time constraints of network television.
“Early on, we talked about whether we should try to televise it,” says Academy president Tom Sherak. “And we decided that it would be a mistake at this point to even think about doing that.
“We don’t want to turn this into another TV show and make money from it. That’s not what it’s about – it’s about honoring people in a way that we can do better than anybody else.”
The decision to move the honorary awards out of the main Oscar show has drawn criticism from those who feel that the honorary award presentations were frequently a highlight of that show, and that it disrespects Bacall, Calley, Corman and Willis to move them out of primetime and off TV altogether.
In the Guardian, David Thompson saluted the four honorees and mocked the Oscars for moving them to an untelevised event. If viewers don’t care about seeing the honorary awards, he said, “[T]he Academy might as well roll up the carpet and face the fact that the Oscars are a dying ritual.”
For years, the Academy has been trying to keep the length of the Oscarcast to three and a half hours or less; new rules that sharply restricted the honorary awards helped shorten the show, but they also meant that one or at the most two people could be honored each year.
More than one Academy governor has told me about the moment that always occurred at the annual board meeting when the names of all the honorary nominees were written on a board: “It took your breath away to see all those people listed on the board, but it was awful to realize that you could only give an Oscar to one or two of them.”
