After eight nominations over the past 44 years, Glenn Close is finally getting her close-up with Oscar; and after a feature directorial career that didn’t even begin until he was 40, and is still going strong, 88-year-old Ridley Scott is finally also getting long-deserved recognition from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Both have been selected to receive Honorary Oscars at this year’s Governors Awards in November.
Close and Scott will be joined by legendary Disney animator Floyd Norman, who is also receiving an honorary statuette. Additionally being honored this year are indie producing stalwarts Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler, who have been named recipients of the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, now an Oscar statuette instead of the bust of the man it is named for.
Related Stories
“The Academy’s Board of Governors is thrilled to present this year’s Governors Awards to five remarkable individuals whose groundbreaking work has forever shaped the art of filmmaking,” Academy president Lynette Howell Taylor said Wednesday. “Throughout her extraordinary body of work, Glenn Close’s unparalleled emotional range has brought to life some of the most complex characters in cinema. Floyd Norman is the legendary animator who has broken barriers and inspired generations of artists over his remarkable career. Sir Ridley Scott is a true visionary whose decades-long legacy has left an immeasurable impact on global cinema and culture. Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler play a central role in American independent cinema, championing bold, ambitious and distinctive storytelling.”
Watch on Deadline
The 17th annual Governors Awards will be presented in the Ray Dolby Ballroom at Ovation in Hollywood on Sunday, November 15.
Close holds the record for actors with eight losses and no Oscar. Peter O’Toole also had eight losses with no wins but was presented an Honorary Oscar in 2003, three years before receiving his eighth and final nomination for Venus and racking up his eighth loss. Every year Close is among the first names that come up from pundits trying to predict overdue stars who could receive this award. Finally the Academy’s board got on board, as it were.
Her acting career spans over five decades, with more than 100 film credits. The first of her Oscar nominations came for her feature film debut in 1982’s The World According to Garp, and has since received further nominations for The Big Chill, The Natural, Fatal Attraction, Dangerous Liaisons, Albert Nobbs, The Wife and Hillbilly Elegy. Other film credits include Jagged Edge, Reversal of Fortune, Hamlet, 101 Dalmatians, 102 Dalmatians, Mars Attacks!, Air Force One, The Stepford Wives and Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery among many many others. She has won numerous awards including three Emmys and two Tonys. She has been nominated three times for Grammys as well, but if she ever gets a win there she would have an EGOT.
An animator and storyboard artist, Norman began his esteemed 65-year career at Walt Disney Animation Studios in 1956, becoming the studio’s first Black animator. His first Disney feature film was Sleeping Beauty, and he contributed to such classics as The Sword in the Stone, Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book and Robin Hood, as well as the short films Donald in Mathmagic Land, Goliath II and Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree. Norman’s other notable film credits include The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mulan, Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc.
Scott has received Oscar nominations for directing Thelma & Louise, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down, as well as a Best Picture nomination for The Martian. Across a career spanning nearly six decades, he has also directed such films as Alien, Blade Runner, Legend, Black Rain, G.I. Jane, Kingdom of Heaven, American Gangster, Prometheus, All the Money in the World, House of Gucci, The Last Duel, Napoleon and the upcoming feature The Dog Stars. In 2024, Scott was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire for his services to the British film industry.
Vachon and Koffler founded the New York-based independent production company Killer Films in 1995. Together, they have produced such films as Hedwig and the Angry Inch, One Hour Photo, Camp, The Company, The Notorious Bettie Page, May December and Materialists. Vachon and Koffler earned an Oscar nomination for Best Picture for Past Lives in 2024. Their productions at Killer Films also include Safe, Velvet Goldmine, Happiness, Boys Don’t Cry, Far from Heaven, I’m Not There, Still Alice, Carol, First Reformed, Vox Lux, The World to Come, Zola and A Different Man.
The Honorary Award is given “to honor extraordinary distinction in lifetime achievement, exceptional contributions to the state of motion picture arts and sciences in any discipline, or for outstanding service to the Academy.”
The Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award is presented to a creative producer whose body of work reflects a consistently high quality of motion picture production.
There will be no Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award presented this year. Dolly Parton was the most recent recipient of that award last year.
It sucks to be nominated and not win, but participation awards diminish the Oscars.
This is actually a good batch, and I don’t want to take anything away from them – but yikes, it’s gotten very clear that the board has something against Harrison Ford, as it’s insanity that he still hasn’t been chosen.