‘Making movies is what I am’: Tom Cruise receives Oscar for lifetime achievement | Tom Cruise

TTom Cruise finally took home an Oscar Sunday night in Los Angeles, but not for a specific acting role. The star of the Top Gun franchise, Jerry Maguire and Mission: Impossible, received an honorary Oscar 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 Young noted that Cruise’s “incredible commitment to our filmmaking community, the theatrical experience, and stunt community has inspired us all.” Recalling his efforts to film Mission: Impossible VII in 2020, Yang added that Cruise “helped propel the industry during a challenging time during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Cruise, who has previously been nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actor for Born on the Fourth of July and Jerry Maguire and Best Supporting Actor for Magnolia, described his first falling in love with the medium, saying: “I remember the beam of light that just cut across the room. I remember looking up and seeing the image just explode on the screen, and suddenly the world became so much bigger than the one 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 and story telling.

Cruise was introduced by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, who is working with the actor on an untitled film due for release in 2026. Saying that “writing a four-minute speech to celebrate the 45th anniversary of Tom Cruise’s career is what is known in this city as an impossible task,” Iñárritu then described the actor’s work as “meticulously choreographed” but feeling “completely improvised and structured like a movie.” Hour, but it flows like gas.’” Iñárritu said his on-screen strength was also present off-screen: he once witnessed Cruise eating chili peppers “like it was popcorn,” while “I, as a proud Mexican, was crying with just one bite.”

“This may be his first Oscar, but from what I’ve seen and experienced, it won’t be his last,” Iñárritu added. When you stand next to Cruz, he said, “you begin to wonder whether the rest of us belong to a completely different, rapidly disappearing species.”

The Academy also paid tribute to Dolly Parton, awarding an honorary Oscar to “one of the few people left in this world who is loved by everyone.” Parton, who recently had health scares that postponed her Las Vegas residency, was unable 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.

“Dolly’s spirit and heart are so good and so real,” Tomlin told an audience of celebrities at the Ray Dolby Auditorium in Hollywood. “She has fake nails, fake hair, but she’s the most authentic person I’ve ever known.”

Parton — who had previously been nominated for two Best Song Oscars — launched the Dollywood Foundation in 1988 to support education in her home county of Tennessee. Seven years later, she launched a book donation program, which eventually went global. It has also supported disaster relief efforts, including providing $1 million last year for Hurricane Helen recovery, and helped fund COVID vaccine research.

“My mom and dad showed me that the more you give, the more blessings will come your way,” Parton said in a pre-recorded acceptance speech. “And I have been more blessed than I could ever have dreamed of.” She said the award “makes me want to dream of new ways to help lift people up. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be here for?” Her message was followed by a powerful rendition of Andra Day’s song Parton’s Jolene.

The Governors Awards are a reception and dinner that serves as a kind of curtain raiser for the Academy Awards, where many attendees are among the hopefuls in this year’s race. The mood is usually relaxed and cheerful. It may help that the ceremony is not televised, and is largely restricted to entertainment industry insiders – everyone already knows who will go home with the figurines. (This year’s honorees were announced in June.) Each of the evening’s honorees received a standing ovation from their peers.

Next to be honored was Wayne Thomas, the longtime production designer — in his words, someone who “takes a writer’s words and turns them into tangible images” — and whose credits include “Do the Right Thing,” “A Beautiful Mind,” “Malcolm X” and “Hidden Figures.”

“To enter the world of Wayne Thomas is to find yourself in the hands of a creative artist, a meticulous and masterful filmmaker, and a pioneer [who has] “He opened our eyes to new possibilities,” Octavia Spencer said in a speech introducing Thomas — who she noted was the first black production designer to join the Art Directors Guild. His films, she says, “portray a vibrant range of black lives, and that is by no means an accident.” Thomas “not only changed the way black lives are shown in films, he changed the lives of black artists in the entire industry.”

In his acceptance speech, Thomas spoke about 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 used to sit on my front stoop and travel the world. Now the local gangs looked down on me and called me ‘sissy’. But this sissy grew up to work with some great directors.”

Cynthia Erivo paid tribute to actress, 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 numerous Oscar ceremonies. “Knowing Miss Debbie means knowing that she refuses to let her dreams fade away,” 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 spoke of the people who helped her along the way, including her parents, “who raised their children to believe that we are citizens of the universe and that there are no boundaries, and that anything we can see, we can be.” She added: “Movies helped us see a lot of things. We were faced with brick walls, glass ceilings and ‘White Only’ signs everywhere. But we grew up believing in ourselves.” Allen said the award will serve as a reminder “not of what I did, but of what I mean and what I should do.”

The final words of the night belonged to Cruz. He said the film reveals: “Our shared humanity, and how similar we are in so many ways. No matter where we come from, in this theater, we laugh, we feel together, we heal together, and that is the power of cinema. So filmmaking is not what I do, it is who I am.”