Hollywood bestows honorary Oscars at Governors Awards
The movie industry officially kicked into awards season on Saturday night with the Governors Awards while reeling from a still-widening sexual harassment scandal.
Stars donned black tie and formal gowns to walk the red carpet of the glamorous Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences event honouring writer-director Charles Burnett, cinematographer Owen Roizman, actor Donald Sutherland and director Agnes Varda.
Each received Oscar statuettes for their distinguished careers in the annual ceremony, which signals the celebratory opening to the awards race that ends with the Oscars on March 4.
But the event was clouded by still more breaking weekend harassment revelations, including the suspension of Supergirl TV producer Andrew Kreisberg for sexual misconduct claims.
“The good news is that tonight it’s about celebrating these four people,” actor Andrew Garfield said on the red carpet, praising the Oscar honorees while acknowledging the harassment victims.
“(This event) is isolated from the horrific revelations that are occurring daily in our industry and all industries where there are abuses of power. This is an endemic, patriarchal, toxic masculine issue that’s coming to the surface now,” said Garfield.
Jennifer Lawrence presented the Oscar to her Hunger Games co-star Donald Sutherland, who she says “took me under his wing” as a newbie actress.
“For someone as generous and talented it’s odd to think that Donald Sutherland has never won an Oscar before tonight,” said Lawrence, mentioning some of the actor’s “iconic roles” ( Ordinary People, MASH, The Dirty Dozen, Klute). “His work is movie magic at its best.”
Holding his Oscar, Sutherland, 82, admitted he had been “beset by my mind’s unrelenting interrogation of me demanding to know if I deserve this”. But he found awards solace and justification in the words of the great comedian Jack Benny.
Dustin Hoffman, who has been accused in two separate harassment incidents, received healthy applause from the audience when presenting the Oscar to his Tootsie cinematographer Owen Roizman, 81 ( The French Connection, The Exorcist, Network).
Jessica Chastain and Angelina Jolie were part of a group of prominent Hollywood women who praised honoree Agnes Varda, the pioneer of the French New Wave film-making movement. Varda, 89, called them “my feminist guardian angels”.
The French director was so pleased to have won the Oscar that she announced from the stage, “Tonight I feel like dancing, the dance of cinema.” Varda joyfully broke into twirls with Jolie.
Ava DuVernay brought director Charles Burnett ( Killer Of Sheep, To Sleep With Anger) onto the stage saying the African-American trailblazer was “a giant, a legend to us, an icon long before today”.
Burnett, 73, told of a teacher who pointed a finger at him as a young student saying, “You’re not going to be anything.” The award definitively proved the teacher wrong.
“I don’t know if he’s still around,” said Burnett. “If he is, I do hope he reads the trades.”