‘He is movies.’ Actor Tom Cruise is bestowed with honorary Oscar

Dolly Parton and Debbie Allen are also feted at the annual Governors Awards.

- BY GLENN WHIPP

“I CARRY you with me,” Cruise told the audience at Sunday night’s ceremony.

(KEVIN WINTER Getty Images)

If you agree with filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu that Tom Cruise “doesn’t just make movies — he is movies,” then the Oscar that Cruise received at the motion picture academy’s annual Governors Awards wasn’t just long overdue.

It was a restoration of balance, a necessary correction, not to mention a nod to the sheer weight of Cruise’s body of work in the collective imagination.

When multi-hyphenate Debbie Allen, herself an honoree, worked in a reference to the “tighty-whities” Cruise wore sliding across the floor in “Risky Business” into her own acceptance speech, you could understand why he received the night’s longest ovation. He really is movies. In one way or another, he completes us.

Cruise, 63, was still shaking hands and posing for pictures long after the ceremony ended Sunday night. He may in fact still be in the Ray Dolby Ballroom, listening to people tell him giddy and sometimes teary stories of when they first saw him in a movie. After Iñárritu introduced him, Cruise delivered a gracious, cinema-booster speech, at one point asking everyone in the room who had worked with him to stand.

“I carry you with me, each of you, and you are part of every frame of every film I have ever made or ever will make,” Cruise said. And yes, he was in alignment with Iñárritu. “Making films is not what I do. It’s who I am.”

Trailblazer Wynn Thomas, widely recognized as the first Black production designer in film, and Dolly Parton also received Oscars at the Governors Awards ceremony. These honorary Oscars, once part of the televised Academy Awards, were spun off into their own event in 2009.