Nobody at the Academy’s Governors Awards on Sunday night in Hollywood thanked Tom Cruise for saving the movie business, but they didn’t have to.
A couple of weeks after October ended as the worst month at the box office in 27 years, and as doomsayers predicted the potential demise of theatrical moviegoing, the Academy gave an Honorary Oscar to Cruise. You could argue that it was for a 44-year acting career that has earned him three nominations, though none since 2000, but the Academy’s Board of Governors clearly had more on their minds than just his acting.
Cruise, after all, is consistently lauded as being one of theatrical’s biggest supporters through movies like “Top Gun: Maverick,” and he’s one of the few stars not to appear in original work for streaming services.
So if the buzz outside the Ray Dolby Ballroom upstairs from the Dolby Theatre often circled back to the dismal news about the box office, the ovations that Cruise received seemed to be driven by equal parts admiration and desperation. And while nobody said it from the stage, the program said that Cruise was being given the award “for his unwavering commitment to our filmmaking community, his vital support of the theatrical experience and his unmatched body of work.”
And Cruise made the theatrical experience a central part of his acceptance speech. He mentioned that his love of cinema began at an early age – “as early as I can remember” – when he saved his money to buy movie tickets, and figured out ways to get into the theater without paying when he didn’t have the cash.
“Suddenly the world was so much larger than the one that I knew,” he said. “It opened my imagination with the possibility that life could expand far beyond the boundaries that I perceived in my own life.”
He added, “Making films is not what I do. It is who I am.” And then he went on to talk about how he’d learned from people he worked with, from actors and writers and studios and agents and craftsmen. “I’ve learned from the theater owners, exhibitors, and all of you, everyone here make it possible for audiences to gather the dark and experience something together,” he added. “And I’ve learned from the audiences themselves, because without you, none of this has meaning.”
Cruise’s presentation was the last one of the night at the 16th Governors Awards, an annual event that began in 2009 and has grown from a casual way to move the honorary awards off the Oscar telecast to a showpiece event that has also become a full-fledged campaign stop.
Every studio and streamer bought tables and loaded them with the stars and filmmakers for their awards contenders, who mingled in a non-competitive setting: Guillermo del Toro and Scott Cooper chatting in this corner; Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Rian Johnson huddling a few tables away; Jeremy Strong and Chloe Zhao talking out by the entrance to the ballroom; the three actresses from “Sentimental Value” – Elle Fanning, Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas – towering over everybody in the room except Jacob Elordi.
“I was in L.A. a couple of weeks ago and then I went home to Germany,” “A House of Dynamite” and “The Ballad of a Small Player” composer Volker Bertelmann said with a grin. “When they asked me to come back for this, I said, ‘You want me back already?’ But I love this event.”
The untelevised ceremony, which was available to Academy members on a private livestream, honored Cruise, production designer Wynn Thomas and director, actor and choreographer Debbie Allen with Academy Honorary Awards, and Dolly Parton with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. (Parton, who has been ailing in recent months, did not attend in person but accepted with a pre-taped video.) AMPAS President Lynette Howell Taylor kicked off the night, Will Arnett did a few minutes of stand-up comedy (“the Governors Awards has all the pomp and circumstance of the Oscars, with half the publicists!”) and Lily Tomlin, Octavia Spencer, Cynthia Erivo and Alejandro G. I Iñárritu did the presentations to Parton, Thomas, Allen and Cruise, respectively.
Highlights included Andra Day singing a beautifully mournful, slinky version of Parton’s “Jolene” that inspired “Hamnet” director Zhao and star Jessie Buckley to stand up and dance at their table, while urging those around them to do the same; Spencer detailing Thomas’ wildly varied career as the first Black production designer admitted to the Art Directors Guild; and Erivo saying that she “is fortunate enough to consider” Debbie Allen her aunt, followed by Allen delivering an emotional acceptance speech that included a dance-lover’s shout-out to Cruise: “Honey, we loved you when you slid out in those tighty whities!”
And it all built up to Cruise. He got a very lengthy introduction by Iñárritu, the director of Cruise’s next film, who was told to keep his remarks to four minutes but described that assignment as “Mission: Impossible.” The film montage that followed was even longer, and then Cruise’s speech was generous, beginning with detailed tributes to his three fellow honorees and ending with him saying, presumably tongue-in-cheek, that he hoped he’s inspired another kid to figure out a way to get into movie theaters if they can’t afford a ticket.
Afterwards, Leonardo DiCaprio was hustled out a side door to catch a flight, Andra Day accepted countless congratulations on her performance and Iñárritu shrugged off his inability to bring his speech in on time. “I told them it was impossible,” he said. “What was I supposed to do, devote 10 seconds to each one of his movies?”