The first Academy Awards of 2009 will be voted on today – not by the full AMPAS membership of close to 6,000, but by the 43 members of the Academy’s Board of Governors, who’ll meet to select the recipients of what will henceforth be called the Governors Awards.
The awards come in three categories: the Irving Thalberg Award, a bust of its namesake which is given to a producer for his body of work; the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, an Oscar statuette given for charitable or humanitarian efforts; and the most-awarded of the three, the Honorary Academy Award, which rewards a career in any aspect of film.
The honors are being voted a couple of months earlier than usual, since they’ll be handed out not on the main Oscar show but at a separate gala on November 14. And that event will undoubtedly see the largest slate of honorary winners in many years, courtesy of new rules that make it much easier to bestow the awards.
In recent years it’s taken a two-thirds vote of the governors to select the first recipient and a three-fourths vote for the second. New guidelines, instituted when the awards were moved to their own event, call for a simple majority for the first three awards, and three-fourths for the fourth. That means tonight’s gathering will almost certainly result in three Governors Awards, and possibly even four. (Above, composer Ennio Morricone receives his honorary Oscar from Clint Eastwood in 2006. Photo: AMPAS)
So how do they choose who gets what? As usual when it comes to the Academy and voting, it’s a little more complicated than you might imagine.
Prior to the meeting, the AMPAS administration sends each governor a binder containing all the letters of nomination the Academy has received from its members throughout the year. (Letters from non-members are generally discounted – because, executive director Bruce Davis once told me, “if we did it based on public things, all three of the Three Stooges would have honorary awards.”)
At the meeting, the governors can then nominate candidates for any of the three awards. Their candidates don’t have to come from the names in their binders, and many of the members’ proposals are not placed in nomination.
Rather than deciding on each type of award separately, all the names are put on the table at once: one governor might nominate somebody for the Thalberg, another tabs someone for the Hersholt, others pick candidates for Honorary Oscars.
This usually results in about nine or 10 names on the board – at which point, says Davis, “there’s usually a moment when you can see everybody’s mouths open as they’re thinking, my god, they all deserve it. How do you narrow it down?”
But narrow it down they do: each governor votes electronically for the person they think is most deserving, and a winner is chosen. But that person hasn’t won his or her Oscar quite yet – instead, another round of voting is held, where the question before the Governors is a simple one: Do you support giving an Oscar to this candidate?
An Oscar is awarded if the person under consideration gets enough votes (in recently years, the magic number was 30 if all governors are present; tonight it’ll be 22, or fewer if they have no-shows).
