Honorary Awards to Angela Lansbury, Steve Martin, Piero Tosi

[Big Magilla]

I only watched the Angela Lansbury content. At 88 she is the oldest actress to win Oscar, honorary or otherwise, and just as amazing as she has always been. I didn't know she had been on a six month tour of Driving Miss Daisy opposite James Earl Jones in Australia rather than doddering away in her NYC apartment. She is certainly capable of handling another important role, large or small. Maybe someone in that room will find one for her.

[Mister Tee]

For those inclined, a link to the speeches at last night's presentation.

http://www.youtube.com/user/Oscars/videos

[Heksagon]

I don't feel that Angelina Jolie is too young to win the Hersholt. Yes, she is younger than what Hersholt Winners usually are, but she established herself as a big star at a young age, and she has been very profilic doing charity work from early on.

I think she has done plenty to earn the award, and considering she has been in the news a lot this year, it makes sense for the Academy to capitalize on the added publicity.

[Eenusch]

Another example of a big star getting major love was Oprah Winfrey receiving the Hersholt two years ago.

Again, why? For financing a girl's school in South Africa?

If I remember correctly, the Emmy's inaugurated a Bob Hope Humanitarian Award a decade ago and presented it to Oprah during the primetime show. Do they still give this award out?

I just think it's a bit much. And, with the Governor's determined to hand out four awards per year, this trend will probably not abate.

So, we should expect within the next decade that at least two of these three stars...Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Sean Penn...will have a Hersholt.

The show must go on.

[OscarGuy]

I also want to know (before someone beats me to it) that I referenced Ustinov as being an Oscar winner, but suggested Jolie was not. She indeed is an Oscar winner. It was not my intention to suggest otherwise.

[ITALIANO]

much like the too-early, and now totally unwarranted, Nobel Peace Prize to Obama

Difficult not to agree here.

Plus, this is an award deeply based on popularity. Had Liv Ullmann done this kind of humanitarian activity when she was a big international star - back in the early 70s - she would have been an obvious choice. But today they'd clearly go with a very famous name (American, preferably - has this prize ever gone to someone not from the English-speaking world?) rather than with someone who sadly could be to many simply a "Norwegian has-been".

[OscarGuy]

Wasn't Hepburn working with UNICEF (the group this poster references for both Ullmann and Ustinov) as well? And, as I recall, she spent years working on or for various charities. Just because an actor or actress used to be handsome or popular doesn't mean they can't put themselves forward to help those less deserving.

And not to defend Jolie, I think her award has come too early in her philanthropy (much like the too-early, and now totally unwarranted, Nobel Peace Prize to Obama), but she has been working on humanitarian causes for more than a decade now. That's not a small bit of time. Here's what Wikipedia says about her humanitarian work:

UNHCR ambassadorship
"We cannot close ourselves off to information and ignore the fact that millions of people are out there suffering. I honestly want to help. I don't believe I feel differently from other people. I think we all want justice and equality, a chance for a life with meaning. All of us would like to believe that if we were in a bad situation someone would help us."
—Jolie on her motives for joining UNHCR in 2001[73]
Jolie first personally encountered the effects of a humanitarian crisis while filming Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) in war-torn Cambodia, an experience she later credited with having brought her a greater understanding of the world.[74] Upon her return home, she contacted the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for information on international trouble spots.[73] To learn more about the conditions in these areas, she began visiting refugee camps around the world. In February 2001, she went on her first field visit, an 18-day mission to Sierra Leone and Tanzania; she later expressed her shock at what she had witnessed.[73]
In the following months, she returned to Cambodia for two weeks and met with Afghan refugees in Pakistan, where she donated $1 million in response to an international UNHCR emergency appeal,[75][76] the largest donation UNHCR had ever received from a private individual.[77] She covered all costs related to her missions and shared the same rudimentary working and living conditions as UNHCR field staff on all of her visits.[73] Jolie was named a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador at UNHCR headquarters in Geneva on August 27, 2001.[78]
Over the next decade, she went on field missions around the world and met with refugees and internally displaced persons in more than 30 countries.[79] In 2002, when asked what she hoped to accomplish, she stated, "Awareness of the plight of these people. I think they should be commended for what they have survived, not looked down upon."[75] To that end, her 2001-02 field visits were chronicled in her book Notes from My Travels, which was published in October 2003 in conjunction with the release of her film Beyond Borders. She aimed to visit what she termed "forgotten emergencies," crises that media attention had shifted away from,[80] and she became noted for going "where real bullets fly,"[81] traveling to such war zones as Sudan's Darfur region during the Darfur conflict,[82] the Syrian-Iraqi border during the Second Gulf War,[83] where she met privately with U.S. troops and other multi-national forces,[84] and the Afghan capital Kabul during the war in Afghanistan, where three aid workers were murdered in the midst of her first visit.[81]
On April 17, 2012, after more than a decade of service as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, Jolie was promoted to the rank of Special Envoy to High Commissioner António Guterres, the first to take on such a position within the organization.[85] In her expanded role, she represents UNHCR and Guterres at the diplomatic level to facilitate lasting solutions for people displaced by major crises.[85] In the months following the promotion, she made her first visit as Special Envoy—her third over all—to Ecuador, where she met with Colombian refugees,[86] and she accompanied Guterres on a week-long tour of Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq, to assess the situation of refugees from neighboring Syria.[87]
Millennium Village and other projects
In an effort to connect her Cambodian-born son with his heritage, Jolie purchased a house in his country of birth in 2003. The traditional home sat on 39 hectares in the northwestern province of Battambang, adjacent to a national park infiltrated with poachers who threatened the dwindling populations of Asian black bears, Asian elephants, and Indochinese tigers. She purchased the surrounding 60,000 hectares and turned the area into a wildlife reserve named for her son, the Maddox Jolie Project.[88] In recognition of her conservation efforts, King Norodom Sihamoni awarded her Cambodian citizenship on July 31, 2005.[89]
In 2006, Jolie expanded the scope of the project—renamed the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Project (MJP)—to create Asia's first Millennium Village, in accordance with UN development goals.[90] She was inspired by a meeting with the founder of Millennium Promise, noted economist Jeffrey Sachs, at the World Economic Forum in Davos,[88] where she was an invited speaker in 2005 and 2006. Together they filmed a 2005 MTV special, The Diary of Angelina Jolie & Dr. Jeffrey Sachs in Africa, which followed them on a trip to a Millennium Village in Western Kenya. By 2007, some 6000 villagers and 72 employees—some of them former poachers employed as rangers—lived and worked at MJP, in ten villages previously isolated from one another. The compound includes schools, roads, and a soy milk factory, all funded by Jolie. Her home functions as the MJP field headquarters.[88]
In addition to the facilities at MJP, Jolie has built at least ten other schools in Cambodia,[91] and funds the Maddox Chivan Children's Center, a care facility for children affected by HIV, in the capital Phnom Penh.[90] In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the birthplace of her daughter, she funds the Zahara Children's Center, which treats children suffering from HIV or tuberculosis. Both centers are run by the Global Health Committee.[92] She has also built schools elsewhere in the world, including a school and a boarding facility for girls at Kakuma refugee camp in north-western Kenya,[93][94] a school for girls in Tangi, Afghanistan,[95] and another girls-only school in the Afghan capital Kabul.[96] These facilities and other projects are funded through the Jolie–Pitt Foundation, which Jolie and her partner Brad Pitt established in September 2006.[97]
Political and legal involvement


Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Jolie at World Refugee Day in June 2005
Jolie became more involved in promoting humanitarian causes on a political level from 2003 onwards. She began lobbying humanitarian interests in the U.S. capital, where she had met with senators and representatives of Congress at least 20 times by 2006. She has been involved in child and women protection efforts, pushing for legislation to aid child refugees and other vulnerable children in both developing nations and the U.S.,[78] and fronting an international campaign against sexual violence in military conflict zones.[98] She explained in 2006, "As much as I would love to never have to visit Washington, that's the way to move the ball."[78]
Since its founding at the 2007 Clinton Global Initiative, Jolie has co-chaired the Education Partnership for Children of Conflict, which funds education programs for children affected by disaster.[99] In its first year, the partnership supported education projects for Iraqi refugee children, youth affected by the Darfur conflict, and girls in rural Afghanistan, among other affected groups.[99] The partnership has worked closely with the Council on Foreign Relations' Center for Universal Education—founded by the partnership's co-chair, noted economist Gene Sperling—to establish education policies, which resulted in recommendations made to UN agencies, G8 development agencies, and the World Bank.[100] Jolie joined the Council on Foreign Relations in June 2007.[101]
Jolie also co-chairs Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), which provides free legal aid to unaccompanied minors in immigration proceedings across the U.S. She founded KIND in October 2008, in a collaboration with the Microsoft Corporation and 25 leading U.S. law firms.[102] She had previously, from 2005 to 2007, funded a similar initiative, the then-newly launched National Center for Refugee and Immigrant Children.[103][104] In the wake of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, she established the Jolie Legal Fellowship, whose member attorneys—the first of whom was appointed in January 2011[105]—assist and support government officials and other organizations in their efforts to secure the legal protection of Haiti's most vulnerable children.[105]


Jolie at the launch of the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative in May 2012
In May 2012, Jolie joined UK Foreign Secretary William Hague in a campaign against sexual violence in military conflict zones, the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative.[98] To highlight the problem, Jolie and Hague subsequently travelled to eastern DR Congo, where rape has been frequently used as a weapon of war by rebel groups and soldiers.[98] In 2013, she spoke at a G8 foreign ministers meeting, where ministers pledged $36 million in funding to go toward developing international standards for the investigation and prosecution of war rape,[106] and before the UN security council—the UN's most powerful body—which responded by adopting its broadest resolution on the issue to date.[107]

I'm not belittling Ullmann or Ustinov's works here as I'm sure both are deserving, but let's not cast aspersions on Jolie just because everyone thinks her selection was a publicity stunt. Let's also remember that Ustinov had two Oscars already and has been dead for more than a decade. The Academy doesn't honor the dead (though I'm not sure that's what the poster was suggesting), but it also likes to give these types of awards to individuals who've never won or competed for Oscars. This hasn't always been the case, but it is more true than not in recent years.

And what's wrong with using one's celebrity to bring attention to ills in the world. That's what both Hepburn and Jolie did/have done. It's better than half the Hollywood actors out there who couldn't care less about the people in the world and spend much of their time on personal aggrandizement.

[Big Magilla]

I don't disagree that Liv Ullmann would be a more fitting honoree than Angelina Jolie, nor do I disagree with the overlooking of Peter Ustinov, but Audrey Hepburn was not an undeserving choice. She was near death when the award was announced and dead by the time it was presented to her eldest son. It was widely believed at the time that her rectal cancer was somehow due to her travels on behalf of UNICEF - either something she caught from the food or from not taking proper care of herself while doing her charity work.

[Eenusch]

I don't understand why Angelina Jolie is getting the Hersholt.

The Governor's Awards are not televised so they don't need the major Pitt-Jolie star wattage to goose ratings. What gives?

To me, her globetrotting children's missions are more a means of self-healing after years of behaving like a demented brat due to unresolved Daddy issues. So she finally decided to grow up, adopt some kids and stop being a pain in the ass. So let's give her an award? Why?

A more deserving actress-humanitarian for this award would have been Liv Ullman who has worked tirelessly for UNICEF for years. Likewise, I always wondered why Peter Ustinov never got a Hersholt for all his work on behalf of UNICEF. Yet, bored Swiss hausfrau Audrey Hepburn, ditches the Givenchy, goes off to the dark continent a few times and gets lauded. Go figure.

[ITALIANO]

I am, of course, glad especially for Piero Tosi. I know you may think that I am biased, but really, at least on his three first nominations he should have won (Cleopatra over The Leopard?! At least Nicholas and Alexandra had decent costumes, but Death in Venice had sublime ones). The Visconti-Tosi movies are among the most beautiul to look at, and yet they arent "picturesque", they dont overdo their own beauty, there's a sort of severity about it. Gandhi shouldnt have won over La Traviata either, yet there IS a difference between Visconti and his pupil Zeffirelli, and even Tosi couldn't overcome it - Zeffirelli was less austere, more baroque, and La Traviata is honestly too much.

A deserved honorary Oscar I'd say.

[FilmFan720]

I think you're right Greg.

Spielberg was 41 when he won his Thalberg, which is much more of a lifetime achievement award then the Hersholt.

[Greg]

I was under the impression that because Jolie had a preventative mastectomy, that it was no indication of a reduced life span.

[Mister Tee]

Has anyone considered that Jolie's health issues might have made some believe they don't have all the time in the world to honor her clearly-deserving work?

[Heksagon]

Angelina Jolie seems awfully young to be receiving an Honorary Award even if it's a Jean Hersholt. She has to be the youngest to receive a non-juvenile/non-special achievement honorary award of any kind at the Oscars (Hersholt, Thalberg, Honorary Oscar).

Nope. Filmmaking is young men's profession, and it was even more so in the 30s when they started handing out Oscars.

Angelina Jolie is 38 years old, by February she will be 38 years 8 months.

Amongst Honorary Oscar winners, Walt Disney was only 30 years old when he won an Honorary Oscar. Ventriloquist (!) Edgar Bergen war 35, cinematographer Loyal Griggs was 32, sound editor Louis Mesenkop was 36, animator George Pal was 36 and non-professional actor Harold Russell was 33. (However, I guess that Griggs, Mesenkop and Russell can be classified as "special achievement" winners, even if, technically, they weren't)

Amongst Thalberg winners, Darryl F. Zanuck was 35, while David O. Selznick and Jerry Wald were 37.

To my knowledge, Jolie is the youngest Hersholt winner, however, and the youngest non-competitive non-juvenile winner since Wald in 1948.

[FilmFan720]

I guess it just depends on how you define what the Honorary Award should honor. If you think that it should go to best in their field then of course Angela Lansbury should be honored, as she is one of our greatest living actresses. But I have always thought of the Honorary Oscars as going to people who have created an important, lifelong career in cinema, left an indelible mark on the artform but have somehow always missed out on receiving an Oscar...it is why I was ecstatic at such choices as Hal Needham or Kevin Brownlow (who didn't have categories that acknowledged their work) or at picks like Roger Corman, Jean-Luc Godard or D.A. Pennebaker (who make films outside of the traditional filmmaking choices that the Academy typically honors).

That is why I just don't see Angela Lansbury, with her 40-some screen credits, as having a major career in cinema, especially with so many more prolific and important figures in film history. It is a debate we have every year, though, with the OFTA hall of fame and one that I have resigned myself to losing over and over again.