Governors Awards bestow honorary Oscars on Quincy Jones, Bond producers, Richard Curtis and Juliet Taylor
“It’s the Oscar for people who never made a movie good enough to win an Oscar.”
That’s how Governors Award recipient writer/director Richard Curtis jokingly described the Governors Awards — or at least, how he overheard his son describing it to son’s girlfriend.
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In truth, the awards are bestowed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences on a select group of industry standouts, whose career achievements merit singular recognition. Along with Curtis, who received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award (given to someone who has brought credit to the industry by promoting human welfare), this year’s honorees, as voted on by AMPAS’s Board of Governors, were Quincy Jones, Juliet Taylor, and producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli (who received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, which recognizes a body of work that reflects a high quality of motion picture production).
Held annually in mid-November, the Governors Awards ceremony has become the unofficial first stop on the Oscars campaign circuit, and given the current wide-open race, this year’s top contenders all turned out to mingle at this year’s schmoozefest, which took place on Nov. 17 at the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Hollywood.
Angelina Jolie, Paul Mescal, Saoirse Ronan, Amy Adams, Kate Winslet, Jennifer Lopez, Jude Law, Tom Hanks, Zoe Saldana, Selena Gomez, Kevin Costner, and more all mingled in their red carpet finest.
The ceremony also gave a showcase to some of this year’s contenders onstage, with Colman Domingo (“Sing Sing”), Nicole Kidman (“Babygirl”), Daniel Craig (“Queer”), and Hugh Grant (“Heretic”) all serving as presenters to the honorees.
But for all of the goodwill in the room — after all, everyone’s a winner — this year’s ceremony had a poignant twist: honoree Jones died two weeks ago, at the age of 91. His fellow honorees all took pains to acknowledge his loss in their own acceptance speeches, knowing that the tribute to him would come at the show’s end, and his spirit was deeply felt in the room.
After an introduction by Academy president Janet Yang, who acknowledged that the recent announcement of Conan O’Brien as the Oscar host would solve many questions, unofficial emcee Domingo set the tone for the evening, joking that he was auditioning for Broccoli and Wilson’s next film —“Bond or Bond villain? You decide” — and that he was going to put his headshot on every table. Meanwhile, Craig teased, “We came here tonight to find out who the next James Bond will be.” (Spoiler alert: We didn’t.)
After kicking off her high heels to accommodate a too-short microphone, Kidman introduced honoree Juliet Taylor, a casting director whose 50 year career has spanned 100 films and includes work with directors Martin Scorsese, Nora Ephron, Steven Spielberg, and Woody Allen, among others. The tribute reel, which played before her speech, clearly demonstrated that it’s eye for talent that earned her the honorary Oscar — along with Kidman, her discoveries include Jodie Foster, Kirsten Dunst, Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, Holly Hunter, Richard Jenkins, Nathan Lane, and more. “In 2026, casting directors will, for the first time, have their own category at the Oscars,” said Taylor. “It’s been a long time coming, and as someone bridging the generations, I can’t help but think of all the casting directors who came before me who deserve this honor.”
In receiving the Thalberg Award, Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson made history as the first children of a past honoree — their father, Albert Cubby Broccoli, received the same award in 1981. “Barbara and Michael have not only guarded [the Bond franchise’s] legacy, they took what their father created, and a monumental achievement, quite simply made it even better,” said Craig in his introduction. “My father was and will always be my North Star,” said Broccoli. “Thank you, daddy, for giving me the greatest life imaginable.”
Grant used his intro to Curtis to tease the filmmaker, whom he has worked with on multiple projects, including “Four Weddings and A Funeral,” “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” and “Love Actually,” saying Curtis never wanted to cast him in the first place; Curtis got his revenge by referring to “Heretic” — where Grant plays a menacing villain — as a “documentary.” Beyond his filmmaking, though, Curtis was celebrated for his impressive humanitarian efforts, like Britain’s “Red Nose Day,” Comic Relief UK and USA, and Make Poverty History, which have raised billions of dollars for relief efforts. Curtis ended his speech with an impassioned plea for producers to set aside money for impact campaigns. “When films have a dedicated person or team to take the film and use it for campaigning for targeted education, for changing laws, when films get shown to the right people in power at the right time, when films are linked to the right charities, amazing things can happen,” he said.
The final award of the evening was the tribute to Jones, whose life was celebrated by a stirring introduction by Jamie Foxx and a performance by Jennifer Hudson. It fell to Jones’s daughter Rashida Jones, accompanied by several of her siblings, to accept the award on his behalf. After reading from his unfinished speech, she said, “You led the biggest, best, most beautiful life of love every single day you were here. So in honor of our dad, we hope you will do the same. Live with love, lead with love, bring love to everything that you do.”
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