DESCRIPTION:
Charlie Chaplin receives an Honorary award in 1972HONORARY AWARDS ARE GIVEN FOR LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENTS, EXCEPTIONAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES, AND OUTSTANDING SERVICE TO THE ACADEMY.
The Academy’s Honorary Award is given at the discretion of the Board of Governors and not necessarily awarded every year. The Honorary Award may or may not be an Oscar statuette; when it is, the Award is presented as part of the Academy Awards ceremony. This is the Honorary Award most familiar to the public. It is sometimes given to honor a filmmaker for whom there is no annual Academy Award category: choreographer Michael Kidd in 1996, for instance, or animator Chuck Jones in 1995. It can be also given to an organization, such as the National Film Board of Canada in 1988, or even a company, such as Eastman Kodak, which received it that same year.
The Honorary Award is not called a lifetime achievement award by the Academy, but it is often given for a life’s work in filmmaking such as Polish director Andzrej Wajda in 1999 and Elia Kazan the previous year.
The Honorary Award can be given for outstanding service to the Academy, although the last time this happened was in 1979 when an Oscar statuette was presented to Academy Governor Hal Elias, who had served more than a quarter century on the Board of Governors.
The Honorary Award can also take the form of a life membership in the Academy, a scroll, a medal, a certificate or any other design chosen by the Board of Governors. The John A. Bonner Medal of Commendation, given for “outstanding service and dedication in upholding the high standards of the Academy,” is considered an Honorary Award. It is usually given at the annual presentation of Scientific and Technical Awards, a dinner ceremony separate from the annual Oscar telecast.
The only life membership to be conferred as an Honorary Award was given to Bob Hope in 1944 “for his many services to the Academy.” Hope received four Honorary Awards. In addition to his life membership, he received a special silver plaque in 1940 “in recognition of his unselfish service to the Motion Picture Industry,” a gold medal in 1965 for “unique and distinguished service to our industry and the Academy” and an Oscar statuette in 1952 “for his contribution to the laughter of the world, his service to the motion picture industry, and his devotion to the American premise.” And, while it wasn’t an Honorary Award, the Bob Hope Lobby of the Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study (home of the Margaret Herrick Library) was dedicated to Hope in 1990 when he continued to serve the Academy and the industry with a contribution of $1 million to the Center’s Endowment Fund.
The most unusual Honorary Awards went to Edgar Bergen in 1937 and Walt Disney the following year. Bergen’s, presented “for his outstanding comedy creation, ‘Charlie McCarthy,’” was a wooden Oscar statuette with a movable mouth. Disney’s Honorary (his second) was “for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, recognized as a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field for the motion picture cartoon.” It was a standard Oscar statuette and seven miniature statuettes on a stepped base.
Rules for the awarding of the Honorary Award can be found in the annual Academy Awards Rules section.
Jackie Chan receives an Honorary award in 2016HONOREES: FROM 1950 (23rd) TO 2018 (91st)
YearWinner1950 (23rd)George Murphy1951 (24th)Gene Kelly1952 (25th)George Alfred Mitchell1952 (25th)Joseph M. Schenck1952 (25th)Merian C. Cooper1952 (25th)Harold Lloyd1952 (25th)Bob Hope1953 (26th)Pete Smith1953 (26th)20th Century-Fox Film Corporation1953 (26th)Joseph I. Breen1953 (26th)Bell and Howell Company1954 (27th)Bausch & Lomb Optical Company1954 (27th)Kemp R. Niver1954 (27th)Greta Garbo1954 (27th)Danny Kaye1954 (27th)Jon Whiteley and Vincent Winter 1956 (29th)Eddie Cantor1957 (30th)Charles Brackett1957 (30th)B.B. Kahane1957 (30th)Gilbert M. ("Broncho Billy") Anderson1957 (30th)The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers1958 (31st)Maurice Chevalier1959 (32nd)Lee De Forest1959 (32nd)Buster Keaton1960 (33rd) Gary Cooper1960 (33rd) Stan Laurel1960 (33rd) Hayley Mills1961 (34th)Fred L. Metzler1961 (34th)Jerome Robbins1961 (34th)William L. Hendricks1964 (37th)William Tuttle1965 (38th)Bob Hope1966 (39th)Yakima Canutt1966 (39th)Y. Frank Freeman1967 (40th)Arthur Freed1968 (41st)Onna White1968 (41st)John Chambers1969 (42nd)Cary Grant1970 (43rd)Lillian Gish1970 (43rd)Orson Welles1971 (44th)Charles Chaplin1972 (45th)Charles S. Boren1972 (45th)Edward G. Robinson1973 (46th)Henri Langlois1973 (46th)Groucho Marx1974 (47th)Howard Hawks1974 (47th)Jean Renoir1975 (48th)Mary Pickford1977 (50th)Margaret Booth1978 (51st)Walter Lantz1978 (51st)The Museum of Modern Art Department of Film1978 (51st)Laurence Olivier1978 (51st)King Vidor1979 (52nd)Alec Guinness1979 (52nd)Hal Elias1980 (53rd)Henry Fonda1981 (54th)Barbara Stanwyck1982 (55th)Mickey Rooney1983 (56th)Hal Roach1984 (57th)James Stewart1984 (57th)National Endowment for the Arts1985 (58th)Paul Newman1985 (58th)Alex North1986 (59th)Ralph Bellamy1988 (61st)National Film Board of Canada1988 (61st)Eastman Kodak Company1989 (62nd)Akira Kurosawa1990 (63rd)Sophia Loren1990 (63rd)Myrna Loy 1991 (64th)Satyajit Ray1992 (65th) Federico Fellini1993 (66th)Deborah Kerr1994 (67th)Michelangelo Antonioni1995 (68th)Chuck Jones1995 (68th)Kirk Douglas1996 (69th)Michael Kidd1997 (70th)Stanley Donen1998 (71st)Elia Kazan1999 (72nd)Andrzej Wajda2000 (73rd) Jack Cardiff2000 (73rd) Ernest Lehman2001 (74th)Sidney Poitier2001 (74th)Robert Redford2002 (75th)Peter O'Toole2003 (76th)Blake Edwards2004 (77th)Sidney Lumet2005 (78th)Robert Altman2006 (79th)Ennio Morricone2007 (80th)Robert Boyle2009 (82nd)Roger Corman2009 (82nd)Gordon Willis2009 (82nd)Lauren Bacall2010 (83rd)Kevin Brownlow2010 (83rd)Jean-Luc Godard2010 (83rd)Eli Wallach2011 (84th)James Earl Jones2011 (84th)Dick Smith2012 (85th)Hal Needham2012 (85th)D. A. Pennebaker2012 (85th)George Stevens, Jr.2013 (86th)Angela Lansbury2013 (86th)Steve Martin2013 (86th)Piero Tosi2014 (87th)Jean-Claude Carrière2014 (87th)Hayao Miyazaki2014 (87th)Maureen O'Hara2015 (88th)Spike Lee2015 (88th)Gena Rowlands2016 (89th)Jackie Chan2016 (89th)Anne Coates2016 (89th)Lynn Stalmaster2016 (89th)Frederick Wiseman2017 (90th)Agnès Varda2017 (90th)Charles Burnett2017 (90th)Donald Sutherland2017 (90th)Owen Roizman2018 (91st)Marvin Levy2018 (91st)Lalo Schifrin2018 (91st)Cicely Tyson
This content was originally published in OSCARS: HONORARY AWARD
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