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Tom Cruise finally received an Oscar on Sunday night in Los Angeles – though not for a specific acting role. The star of Top Gun, Jerry Maguire and the Mission: Impossible series was given an honorary Academy Award at the annual Governors awards, which are designed to reward lifetime achievement.
In a statement before the event, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Ampas) president Janet Yang cited “Cruise’s incredible commitment to our film-making community, to the theatrical experience, and to the stunts community has inspired us all”. Recalling his efforts to shoot the seventh Mission: Impossible in 2020, Yang added that Cruise “helped to usher the industry through a challenging time during the Covid-19 pandemic”.
Cruise, who was previously nominated for best actor Oscars for Born on the Fourth of July and Jerry Maguire, and best supporting actor for Magnolia, described first falling in love with the medium, saying: “I remember that beam of light just cut across the room. I remember looking up and seeing the image just exploding on the screen, and suddenly the world was so much larger than the one that I knew. Entire cultures, lives, landscapes. It sparked a hunger, a hunger for adventure, a hunger for knowledge, a hunger to understand humanity, to create characters, to tell a story.”
Cruise was introduced by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who is working with the actor on an as yet untitled film due for release in 2026. Saying that “writing a four-minute speech to celebrate Tom Cruise’s 45-year career is what is known in this town as Mission: Impossible”, Iñárritu then described the actor’s work as “meticulously choreographed” but feeling “completely improvised, structured like a clockwork, but flowing like gas”. His onscreen intensity, Iñárritu said, was also present off screen: he once witnessed Cruise downing chilli peppers “like they were popcorn”, while “I, a proud Mexican, was crying with just one bite”.
“This may be his first Oscar, but from what I have seen and experienced, it will not be the last,” Iñárritu added. Standing next to Cruise, he said, you “start to wonder if the rest of us belong to a completely different, rapidly decaying species”.
The Academy also paid tribute to Dolly Parton, awarding an honorary Oscar to “one of the few people that remains in this world that everyone loves”. Parton, who has recently had health concerns that forced the postponement of a Las Vegas residency, was not able to attend the event – but her friend Lily Tomlin was on hand to celebrate the humanitarian work that earned Parton the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian award.
“The soul, the heart of Dolly, it is so good and so true,” Tomlin told an audience of A-listers at the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Hollywood. “She has fake nails, fake hair – but she is the most authentic person I have ever known.”
Parton – who has previously been nominated for two best song Oscars – launched the Dollywood Foundation in 1988 to support education in her home county in Tennessee. Seven years later, she launched a book donation programme that eventually went international. She has also supported disaster relief efforts, including giving $1m last year to Hurricane Helene recovery, and has helped fund Covid vaccine research.
“My mom and dad showed me that the more you give, the more blessings come your way,” Parton said in a prerecorded acceptance speech. “And I’ve been blessed more than I ever dreamed possible.” The award, she said, “makes me want to dream up new ways to help lift people up. And isn’t that what we’re supposed to be here for?” Her message was followed by a powerful rendition of Parton’s song Jolene by the singer Andra Day.
The Governors awards are a reception and dinner that act as a kind of curtain-raiser for the Oscars, with many of its attendees among the hopefuls in this year’s race. The mood is typically relaxed and jovial; it probably helps that the ceremony isn’t televised, and is largely confined to entertainment industry insiders – and everyone already knows who will be going home with statuettes. (This year’s honorees were announced in June.) Each of the evening’s recipients received a standing ovation from their peers.
Next to be honored was Wynn Thomas, a longtime production designer – in his words, the person who “takes the writer’s words and turns them into concrete images” – whose credits include Do the Right Thing, A Beautiful Mind, Malcolm X and Hidden Figures.
“Stepping into the world of Wynn Thomas is to find yourself in the hands of an imaginative artist, a meticulous and masterful film-maker, a trailblazer [who has] opened our eyes to new possibilities,” said Octavia Spencer in a speech introducing Thomas – who, she noted, was the first Black production designer to join the art directors guild. His films, she said, “portray a vibrant range of Black life, and that is by no means an accident”. Thomas “hasn’t just changed the way Black lives are shown in movies, he has changed the lives of Black artists in the entire industry.”
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In his acceptance speech, Thomas reflected on his childhood in West Philadelphia. “There were street gangs and poverty everywhere, and to escape that world, I immersed myself in books,” he said. “I would sit on my front stoop and I would travel around the world. Now the local gangs looked down on me and called me sissy. But that sissy grew up to work with some great directors.”
Cynthia Erivo paid tribute to the actor, dancer, choreographer, director and producer Debbie Allen, who has a long list of credits that include Fame, Amistad, the sitcom A Different World, and choreographing many Academy Awards ceremonies. “To know Miss Debbie is to know that she refuses to let dreams fade,” Erivo said. She recounted how an initial rejection from the North Carolina School of the Arts ultimately led to Allen’s five-decade career on screen and behind the scenes.
For her part, Allen reflected on the people who helped her along the way, including her parents, “who raised their children believing that we were citizens of the universe and that there were no boundaries, and that anything we could see, we could be”. She added: “Movies helped us see a lot of things. And we were faced with brick walls and glass ceilings and ‘White Only’ signs everywhere. But we grew up believing in ourselves.” The award, Allen said, would be a reminder “not of what I’ve done, but what I get, mean and have to do”.
The final words of the night belonged to Cruise. Film, he said, reveals: “our shared humanity, how alike we are in so, so many ways. No matter where we come from, in that theatre, we laugh, we feel together, we heal together, and that is the power of cinema. So making films is not what I do; it is who I am.”
