Honorary Oscars

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Post by Greg »

I find it strangely endearing that, in that recent photo of Eli Wallach, he sits next to a rotary phone.



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Post by Damien »

An Eli Wallach article, written by his great-nephew, A.O. Scott:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010....=movies
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Post by Precious Doll »

anonymous wrote:
Reza wrote:
Johnny Guitar wrote:As to why the Academy chose Godard, I think it was because it gives the Academy much greater prestige to honor JLG than it actually gives to JLG.
The Academy has shockingly chosen very few foreign directors for this honour. The first, during the 1970s, was Renoir followed years later by Kurosawa, Ray, Fellini, Antonioni, Wajda and now Godard. I guess it's a start.

Wonder if they will follow suit by honoring foreign actors as well?
In addition to those, Bergman was given the Irving Thalberg award.

As for foreign actors, Sophia Loren, I believe, is the only predominantly non-English speaking performer to receive an Honorary Oscar.
Sophia Loren' s Honorary Oscar is most of the most undeserved in the Academy's history. She already had won a very much deserved Oscar for Two Women. But aside from a couple of other Italian films and filmography is uninspiring to say the least.

Most of the films she made in English were mediocre at best. Yes she was/as a big star but I felt the Honorary Oscar was completely unnecessary in her case. Frequent co-star Marcello Mastroianni should have received Loren's Honorary Oscar and besides he was a far superior actor then Loren ever was.
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Post by anonymous1980 »

Reza wrote:
Johnny Guitar wrote:As to why the Academy chose Godard, I think it was because it gives the Academy much greater prestige to honor JLG than it actually gives to JLG.
The Academy has shockingly chosen very few foreign directors for this honour. The first, during the 1970s, was Renoir followed years later by Kurosawa, Ray, Fellini, Antonioni, Wajda and now Godard. I guess it's a start.

Wonder if they will follow suit by honoring foreign actors as well?
In addition to those, Bergman was given the Irving Thalberg award.

As for foreign actors, Sophia Loren, I believe, is the only predominantly non-English speaking performer to receive an Honorary Oscar.
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Post by Reza »

Johnny Guitar wrote:As to why the Academy chose Godard, I think it was because it gives the Academy much greater prestige to honor JLG than it actually gives to JLG.
The Academy has shockingly chosen very few foreign directors for this honour. The first, during the 1970s, was Renoir followed years later by Kurosawa, Ray, Fellini, Antonioni, Wajda and now Godard. I guess it's a start.

Wonder if they will follow suit by honoring foreign actors as well?
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Post by Big Magilla »

Interesting read. And, yes, the Academy's board of governors chose to honor Godard because they thought it would add prestige to the Academy, not Godard.

Tom Hanks will probably end up doing the presentation because no one else will.
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Post by Johnny Guitar »

Big Magilla wrote:The very liberal category passes over Maureen O'Hara who is deemed to be a conservative, though as far as I know has never publicly expressed her political opinions, while embracing a man who, if he isn't an anti-Semite, does nothing to dissuade the perception.

Godard's alleged anti-semitism is mainly a way for the press to generate content about this guy. Much easier to do this than to deal with the work itself. Bill Krohn wrote a long and eloquent critical piece about these "controversies" here (this was before the Oscar stuff happened).

As to why the Academy chose Godard, I think it was because it gives the Academy much greater prestige to honor JLG than it actually gives to JLG.
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Post by Big Magilla »

The argument against giving an honorary Oscar to numerous stars from Jean Arthur to Doris Day has always been that they wouldn't show, so why single out someone who not only wouldn't show, but was likely from the get-go to disdain the honor?

The very liberal category passes over Maureen O'Hara who is deemed to be a conservative, though as far as I know has never publicly expressed her political opinions, while embracing a man who, if he isn't an anti-Semite, does nothing to dissuade the perception.

The actor they choose to honor this year, Eli Wallach, while a very nice man, is hardly one of the many screen greats still alive and without proper recognition.

This year, anyway, it's just as well the honorary awards are not part of the TV show.




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Post by Precious Doll »

They should have selected Alain Resnais over JLG. Though JGL has a much larger output then Resnais, and has made a great number of standout film he has not sustained the overall excellence of Resnais over the past 50+ years.

It's pointless giving life time achievement awards to people who don't want them.
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Post by Uri »

This all fiasco reminds me of Emma Thompson in Impromptu inviting all those vanguard intellectuals to her estate only to end up with a bruised ego as well as body. The (very) American Academy just can't accept that that all it is. Some people apparently don't find their approval to be the highest achievement a human can aspire for, and certainly, time and again, Godard was very vocal about it, but off course, they just didn't get it. Serve them well.
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Post by Precious Doll »

Maybe Isabelle Huppert or Nathalie Baye. They have worked for him twice each and speak very good English. Gerard Depardieu is another possibility having worked with Godard once.

Anna Karina maybe, depending on her current relationship with Godard.

I'd say animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot & one of Godard's most used leading men Jean-Paul Belmondo are out. She's crazy (and that has nothing to do with supporting animal rights, a passion I share with her) and Belmondo is in declining health.

There's also Jean-Pierre Leaud.

To be honest I can't think of any directors, particularly ones from English language countries that would be appropriate. From Europe I couldn't think of anyone more appropriate then his current partner and collaborator Anne-Marie Mieville.




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Post by anonymous1980 »

I thought Godard himself was Jewish. Hmmm. I think Truffaut might have been but I'm not sure.

I'm trying to figure out who the hell is going to do the tribute to Godard. I thought Jane Fonda would be no-brainer since she's probably the most famous Hollywood figure currently living that he's worked with but I hear that she described him as a "nightmare" and he even shat on her in the documentary Letter to Jane.

Quentin Tarantino and Jonathan Demme would be possibles but they just did the tribute to Roger Corman last year. I don't think they'll be able to get Woody Allen to fly to L.A. to do a tribute either. Scorsese, perhaps?
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Post by Reza »

November 1, 2010

An Honorary Oscar Revives a Controversy


By MICHAEL CIEPLY
LOS ANGELES ­ Late last week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was still coming to terms with that most deeply confounding of European filmmakers, Jean-Luc Godard.


No one had yet signed on to present an honorary Oscar to Mr. Godard, who has said he will not be on hand anyway at the academy’s awards banquet in Hollywood a week from Saturday. But there was also the touchy question of how to deal with newly highlighted claims that Mr. Godard, a master of modern film, has long harbored anti-Jewish views that threaten to widen his distance from Hollywood, even as the film industry’s leading institution is trying to close the gap.

Over the last month, articles in the Jewish press ­ including a cover story titled “Is Jean-Luc Godard an Anti-Semite?” in The Jewish Journal ­ have revived a simmering debate over whether Mr. Godard, an avowed anti-Zionist and advocate for Palestinian rights, is also anti-Jewish. And this close examination of his posture toward Jews has put a shadow over plans by the academy to honor him at the Nov. 13 banquet, along with the actor Eli Wallach, the filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and the film historian and preservationist Kevin Brownlow. (The separate Oscar telecast is scheduled for Feb. 27, on ABC.)

The academy is doing its best to sidestep the issue. For one thing, don’t look for the touchier aspects of Mr. Godard’s work in the five-minute tribute reel being assembled around New Wave masterpieces. Probably missing will be a much-discussed sequence in the 1976 documentary “Here and There,” about the lives of two families, one French and one Palestinian. In it, alternating images of Golda Meir and Adolf Hitler have suggested to some that Mr. Godard, the narrator and one of the directors of the film, sets them up as equivalents.

“I can imagine it might not be there,” Sidney Ganis, who is producing the ceremony, said on Friday. He also said he had a prospect in mind to present the award.

Mr. Godard, 79, has inspired directors as diverse as Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino with his technique, sophistication and exuberant use of pop culture in 70 feature films. That work, however, had never been honored by the academy until a decision this year to present Mr. Godard with an honorary governors award, given not at the main event in February but at a separate black-tie ceremony for entertainment industry insiders.

To date, there has been no surge of opposition to match the protests that greeted a decision to give Elia Kazan an honorary Oscar in 1999, despite his having named colleagues before the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating Communist influence in Hollywood during the red baiting era.

But Mr. Ganis and others in the academy have fielded queries from members who question the propriety of an award that is drawing attention not just to Mr. Godard’s well-known disregard for Hollywood but also to positions and statements in which he has mingled his mistrust of the mainstream movie world with a wariness of traits he associates with Jews.

In one of the more striking such statements, in a 1985 interview in Le Matin quoted in Richard Brody’s 2008 biography, Mr. Godard spoke of the film industry as being bound up in Jewish usury.

“What I find interesting in the cinema is that, from the beginning, there is the idea of debt,” he is quoted as saying. “The real producer is, all the same, the image of the Central European Jew.”

In cataloguing and assessing such pronouncements, Mr. Brody, who is generally admiring in the biography, titled “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard,” attributed what he called “the hardening and sharpening of Godard’s anti-Semitic attitudes” to factors that included his childhood in war-torn Europe, a turn toward pro-Palestinian radicalism in the 1960s and a complicated view of history in which Mr. Godard has blamed Moses for having corrupted society by bringing mere text, in the form of written law, down from the mountain, after having encountered an actual image, the burning bush.

Neither Mr. Godard nor his associates could be reached for comment on Monday, which was a holiday in France.

“If Hollywood wants to honor his work, great, I’m fine with it,” said Mike Medavoy, a film producer and academy member who was born in Shanghai after his parents fled the Holocaust.

But Mr. Medavoy added that he was less than charmed by what he characterized as Mr. Godard’s “narrow mind” when it comes to Jews and the film business. “I’m not fine with that,” he said.

Mr. Godard once complained that Steven Spielberg had misused the image of Auschwitz in the making of “Schindler’s List.” In 1995, Mr. Godard turned down an honorary award from the New York Film Critics’ Circle, in part, he said, because he had personally failed “to prevent Mr. Spielberg from reconstructing Auschwitz."

Mr. Spielberg never responded publicly to that complaint, according to Marvin Levy, his spokesman. Mr. Levy said Mr. Spielberg had not decided whether to attend the awards ceremony but that his absence, in any case, would carry no message about Mr. Godard.

For whatever reason, the gap between Mr. Godard and the academy appears to have run deeper than the occasional snub of a director, like, say, Alfred Hitchcock, who never won a directing Oscar, but was finally given the academy’s Irving G. Thalberg Award, for a lifetime of producing, in 1968.

Researchers at the academy’s Margaret Herrick Library turned up no sign that any aspect of a Godard film had ever been so much as nominated for an Oscar, despite awards and festival recognition abroad.

The absence of recognition by the academy may have less to do with Mr. Godard’s well-known antagonism toward Hollywood than with the fact that many academy members were simply looking elsewhere when his career erupted in the 1960s as a leader of the French New Wave with films like “Breathless” and “Band of Outsiders.” The producer Walter Mirisch, for example, said, “During the time of his films, I was occupied with my own.” Mr. Mirisch, 88, served a number of terms as the academy’s president and won a best picture Oscar in 1968 for “In the Heat of the Night.”

In preparing for this year’s governors awards, the second in a planned annual series separate from the televised Oscar ceremony, Phil Alden Robinson, an academy vice president and a governor, proposed Mr. Godard for recognition that was supposed to close a gap with people like Mr. Mirisch.

“Godard speaks to a generation that’s only now getting voting weight in the academy,” said Mr. Robinson, who is both a writer and a director, and had an Oscar nomination in 1990 for his “Field of Dreams” script. “The older generation didn’t have the same regard for him.”

Inadvertently, however, Mr. Robinson pried open a debate that has raged around artists as august as the poet Ezra Pound and as popular as the actor and filmmaker Mel Gibson: Is the work somehow tainted by the attitudes of the man?

Daniel S. Mariaschin, an executive vice president at B’nai B’rith International, strongly denounced the academy’s decision to honor Mr. Godard.

“They have set up standards for art, but they take a pass on standards for decency and standards for morality,” Mr. Mariaschin said on Monday. “How could one possibly derive enjoyment or pleasure from this, knowing that the individual holds these views?”

Mr. Mariaschin said he was surprised to see, based on recent news reports, that Mr. Godard had not back-pedaled when challenged regarding his view of Jews. “He’s not even contrite,” Mr. Mariaschin said.

For Mr. Robinson, the art and the artist are separate. “D. W. Griffith got an honorary Oscar in 1936,” he said, “and the man was horribly racist.”

Besides, said Mr. Robinson, whose “Field of Dreams” was a fantasy about the disgraced members of the Chicago White Sox team that threw the World Series: “You’re talking to someone who believes Shoeless Joe Jackson should be in the Hall of Fame.”

Scott Sayare contributed reporting from Paris.
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Post by anonymous1980 »

Jean Luc Godard officially NOT attending the Governor's Awards.

But it seems as though he IS accepting the award.
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