Glenn Close Finally Gets Her Oscar Moment as She and Ridley Scott Take Honorary Academy Awards Tonight
(Illustration: USA Current Affaires)
Glenn Close is finally going to hold an Oscar. After eight nominations and eight long walks home empty-handed, the 79-year-old acting legend will receive an honorary Academy Award at the Governors Awards on Sunday night — and this time, she gets to make the acceptance speech.
Close will be honoured at the Academy's annual Governors Awards at the Ray Dolby Ballroom at Ovation Hollywood, the same complex that hosts the main ceremony, the Associated Press reported. She shares the record with the late Peter O'Toole for the most Oscar nominations without a win — a record she has carried, with remarkable grace, for decades.
She will not be alone on the stage. Director Ridley Scott, 88, will also receive an honorary Oscar for a career that includes Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator — although he will not be there in person, accepting instead by recorded video. Disney animator Floyd Norman and Killer Films producers Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler will also be honoured.
Eight Times a Bridesmaid
Close's eight nominations stretch across five decades, from The World According to Garp in 1982 through The Big Chill, The Natural, Fatal Attraction, Dangerous Liaisons, Albert Nobbs, The Wife and Hillbilly Elegy. Three of them — Fatal Attraction, Dangerous Liaisons and The Wife — were genuine frontrunner moments, the kind of performances that usually end with a statuette. Each time, the envelope went to someone else.
Her most recent near-miss, for The Wife in 2019, was widely seen as her best chance: she had swept the season's precursor awards and arrived at the ceremony as the favourite, only to lose to Olivia Colman for The Favourite. She took the defeat with the same dignity she has brought to every loss — and kept working, as she always has.
That is what makes Sunday night matter. The honorary Oscar is the Academy's way of saying what the competitive races never did: that a career this long, this varied and this consistently excellent deserves the industry's highest honour, whatever the envelopes said.
A Director Who Never Needed the Statue
Scott's case is just as strong. The 88-year-old has been nominated four times, including best director nods for Thelma & Louise and Black Hawk Down, without ever winning — despite directing some of the most influential and commercially successful films of the past half-century, from Alien and Blade Runner to Gladiator and The Martian.
He will accept his honour by recorded video, the AP reported, rather than attending in person. It is a fittingly unsentimental choice from a director who has never chased the ceremony — and whose films, unlike most awards-season hopefuls, are still being watched, quoted and remade decades after they were released.
The Governors Awards are different from the Oscars themselves: the honours are chosen by a selection committee of the Academy's Board of Governors, rather than voted on by the full membership, and they traditionally go to artists with extraordinary careers but no competitive Oscar. It is, in other words, the Academy's hall of fame — and on Sunday night, two of its most deserving members finally take their place in it.
A Night for the Lifers
The evening will also honour Floyd Norman, the pioneering Disney animator whose career spans some of the studio's most beloved films, and Vachon and Koffler, the co-founders of Killer Films, who will receive the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for producers whose body of work reflects consistently high quality.
For Close, though, the night is personal. She has spent 44 years being introduced as the greatest actor never to win an Oscar — a compliment that always carried a sting. On Sunday night, she finally gets to hold one, and to say the words she has waited half a century to say. After eight nominations, nobody in the room will begrudge her a single second of it.
Awards season is already delivering emotional moments: Phil Collins cried as he accepted his second Rock Hall induction on Saturday night, and Spider-Man swept the Kids' Choice Awards with BTS taking three blimps.
Which Glenn Close performance deserved the Oscar most? Let us know in the comments.
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