Actor Tom Cruise finally gets an Oscar as he accepts honorary prize at Governors Awards
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Tom Cruise with his Honorary Academy Award on stage during the 16th Governors Awards in Los Angeles on Nov 16.
PHOTO: AFP
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LOS ANGELES – How does a person summarise the 45-year career of American actor Tom Cruise in a four-minute speech?
“Mission impossible,” said Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu on Nov 16, as Hollywood celebrated the movie star with an honorary Oscar at the Governors Awards.
Inarritu, who directed Cruise in an untitled film set for release in October 2026, introduced his leading man and said Cruise’s talent extended beyond the dangerous stunts which have made him famous.
“It is not how far he runs or how high he jumps,” Inarritu, 62, said. “It’s how precisely he decides to move, those tiny calibrations.”
Honorary Oscar statuettes were handed out to Cruise, 63, and three others selected by the board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Cruise, a four-time Oscar nominee who has never won the award, was chosen for his work in films from Risky Business (1983) to Top Gun (1986 and 2022) to the Mission: Impossible franchise (1996 to 2025).
He also has become a prominent champion for the movie business as it faces competition from streaming and social media.
During his acceptance speech, he talked about how seeing movies in a cinema impressed him as a child.
“Suddenly, the world was so much larger than the one that I knew,” he told a crowd of luminaries who included film-maker Steven Spielberg, actor Leonardo DiCaprio and singer-actress Ariana Grande. Cruise said he worked every job he could to earn money for movie tickets.
“I will always do everything I can to support this art form and to champion new voices, to protect what makes cinema powerful, hopefully without too many more broken bones,” he said to laughter. He broke his ankle in 2017 while filming a stunt for Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018).
“Making films is not what I do. It’s who I am,” he added.
The gala also honoured American singer Dolly Parton with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her charitable efforts, including founding a library that has provided more than 300 million books to children. The 79-year-old accepted her award via video.
Other honourees were American actress and choreographer Debbie Allen and production designer Wynn Thomas. REUTERS
