Tom Cruise received his first-ever Oscar at the Governors Awards. He delivered an emotional speech reflecting on his lifelong love for cinema.
Tom Cruise was felicitated with an Academy Honorary Award at the Governors Awards. After receiving his first Oscar, the 63-year-old Hollywood icon delivered an emotional speech about the profound role cinema has played in his life.
Cruise shoulders one of the world’s biggest blockbuster franchises like Mission: Impossible and Top Gun. He received the award from filmmaker Alejandro G Iñárritu. They are working together in a film slated to release next year.
Tom Cruise wins honorary Oscar
Tom Cruise was honoured with the Academy Honorary Award on Sunday night. The Hollywood icon utilised his moment on stage to acknowledge the numerous people who breathe life into films. He also celebrated the power of cinema to connect people across borders. The actor also received a two-minute standing ovation.
On Sunday, The Academy’s page made the announcement stating, “Debbie Allen, Tom Cruise, and Wynn Thomas will each receive Academy Honorary Awards, recognizing their extraordinary contributions to cinema. Dolly Parton will be presented with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her philanthropic impact (sic).”
What was Tom Cruise’s winning speech?
“The cinema, it takes me around the world,” Cruise said on the stage, reflecting on how films have shaped his life. “It helps me to appreciate and respect differences. It also shows me our shared humanity, how alike we are in so, so many ways. And no matter where we come from, in that theatre, we laugh together, we feel together, we hope together, and that is the power of this art form. And that is why it matters, that is why it matters to me. So making films is not what I do, it is who I am,” he added.
Cruise also recalled the moment he fell in love with movies. “My love for cinema began at a very early age, as early as I can remember… I was just a little kid in a darkened theatre, and I remember that beam of light just cut across the room, and I remember looking up, and it seemed to be just exploded on the screen. Suddenly, the world was so much larger than the one that I knew,” he further said.
That experience, he added, lit a spark in him – “a hunger for adventure, a hunger for knowledge, a hunger to understand humanity, to create characters, to tell a story, to see the world.” “It opened my imagination to the possibility that life could expand far beyond the boundaries that I then perceived in my own life. And that beam of light opened a desire to open the world, and I have been following it ever since,” he continued.
Over the years, Cruise has earned four Oscar nominations – for Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, Magnolia, and as a producer of Top Gun: Maverick.
(With inputs from PTI)
