This year's honorary Oscars list has overlooked veteran actors in favor of industry insiders such as George Stevens Jr., who helped to found the American Film Institute. Yesterday, the Academy's Board of Governors announced the list of this year's honorary nominees as well as revealing that the awards will be presented at the Academy's fourth annual Governors Awards at the Roy Dolby Ballroom at Hollywood and Highland.
Deadline.com spoke to the incoming President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hawk Koch, about these awards and he explained that they did want the pressure of making the event into a televised spectacle and chose to keep it as it is, so that they could honor the people they wish to honor. Many movie buffs and industry insiders may well have been expecting to see a nod for some veteran actors who have been eluded by awards success, such as Max Von Sydow, Angela Lansbury or Doris Day. They will be disappointed, however as 2012 marks the first year that not one single actor made the cut for the honorary gongs. They have instead gone to George Stevens Jr., the documentarian DA Pennebaker, stuntman Hal Needham and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is nominated for his involvement in several Disney movies, such as The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast.
Though this year's awards will no doubt be a disappointment for the acting fraternity, those that have been nominated are no less deserving of the honor. Few could argue that Hal Needham, for example, hasn't earned his Oscars nod, having suffered a punctured lung, a broken back and 56 fractured bones in his impressive stunt-performing career.