Dear Francis Ford Coppola and Jean Luc Godard, you may be alive and kicking, and still making films, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences basically believes your best days are behind you and you’re never going to win a proper Oscar.
Or at least that’s one cynical way about looking at the honorary Oscars that will be bestowed upon these two titans of cinema, plus silent film historian Kevin Brownlow and 94-year-old actor Eli Wallach known for roles in Elia Kazan’s “Baby Doll,” “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “The Godfather Part III” and “The Magnificent Seven.”
We shouldn’t have to tell you why Coppola and Godard are important, seminal and deserving, but in case you’ve lived under a rock, Godard kicked-open the French New Wave scene in 1960 and arguably created a paradigm shifting game changer with “Breathless;” a cinematic ripple was felt through film for decades. His Marxist philosophy and radical approach to conventional cinema soon made him quite intolerable for most movie goers by the end of the ’60s/early ’70s, but he had effectively made his mark with a string of unforgettable classics, by then cementing his position as a cinema godhead forever more. While nominated for Cannes’ Palme d’Or six times and having received numerous awards throughout his illustrious career, Godard was never nominated for an Oscar, Foreign Film feature or otherwise.
Known for cinematic touchstones like “The Godfather,” “The Godfather II,” “Apocalypse Now,” “The Conversation” and to a lesser extent the still-excellent, “Rumble Fish” and “The Outsiders,” Coppola was nominated for 14 Oscars in total (including a producing credit on his friend George Lucas’ “American Graffiti” and won five Oscars total in his career, including three for “The Godfather II” (Best Director, Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay), one for “The Godfather” (Best Adapted Screenplay) and one for “Patton” (Best Adapted Screenplay).
Evidently the Academy believes Coppola deserves one more and while his career nosedived in the 1990s, he’s come back strong in recent years with “Youth Without Youth” and “Tetro” and is deserving regardless. Just like last year, honorary Oscars are no longer given out during the telecast as the producers feel old people put modern day audiences to sleep. The awards will be given out on Saturday, November 13 in the Grand Ballroom at the Hollywood & Highland Center in Hollywood. They are not televised, but clips usually make their way onto the Internet a day later. [The Wrap]
