Woody Allen to Receive Golden Globes’ Cecil B. DeMille Award

Top honor from the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. will be presented to writer-director-actor at awards ceremony on Jan. 12

Woody Allen has been named recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award, the top honorary award from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the HFPA announced on Friday.

The award will be presented to Allen on Sunday, Jan. 12 at the Golden Globes ceremony. No word on whether the famously L.A.-phobic writer-director plans to attend — when he won an Oscar for “Midnight in Paris” two years ago, he opted to stay in New York rather than traveling west for the show.

The announcement came as Allen’s latest film, “Blue Jasmine,” is enjoying the prolific filmmaker’s widest release ever, and has put star Cate Blanchett and Allen himself securely in the awards conversation.

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“There is no one more worthy of this award than Woody Allen,” said HFPA president Theo Kingma in the press release announcing the award. “His contributions to filmmaking have been phenomenal and he truly is an international treasure.”

Other recipients of the award in recent years have included Morgan Freeman, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Warren Beatty and Anthony Hopkins. Jodie Foster won the award last year, and accepted it with an attention-getting speech in which she asked for her privacy but also acknowledged her longtime partner, Cydney Bernard.

Over the years, Allen has been nominated for 13 Golden Globes, but has only won twice — once for writing “The Purple Rose of Cairo” in 1985, and again for his screenplay to “Midnight in Paris” in 2012. By contrast, he has been nominated for 23 Oscars, and has won four.

His other films include “Annie Hall,” “Manhattan,” “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Match Point” and “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”

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