Honoray Oscars to Wallach, Brownlow, Godard; Thalberg to Coppola

While I'll probably still keep complaining like a broken record that last year's decision to relegate Honorary Oscar recipients to a separate banquet in November instead of on Oscar's stage in February is both distasteful and disrespectful, there does appear to be a quaint charm in dedicating an entire evening to them without the pressure of antsy televisors itching to move along to something less "boring".

Such appears to have been the case last night, when actor Eli Wallach, documentarian/preservationist Kevin Brownlow, and New Wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard (who infamously declined his invitation to the presentation some months ago) were awarded with long-time-coming Honorary awards from the Academy's Board of Governors. The already amply awarded Francis Ford Coppola received the Irving G. Thalberg Award.

The evening spanned a leisurely 4-and-a-half hours, which is how you know that no trigger-happy directors were involved. We can only hope producers Bruce Cohen and Don Mischner (who produced and oversaw the whole ceremony) will exercise similar patience when they put on the Oscar telecast on February 27th.

All in all, it sounds like the Governors Awards are a pleasant enough time, but I've gotta wonder, would it really be such a ratings travesty to have these giants of their field stand on the stage and say a few words on Oscar night? Is it really worth depriving them their coast-to-coast moment of limelight so that we can instead suffer through yet another superfluous montage introduced by (insert name of Twilight star here) or Miley Cyrus*? Last year's Oscarcast was dreadful, and I couldn't think of a better way to class up this year's than by granting Wallach, Brownlow, and Godard the stage time they deserve.

*I will seriously throw up if she's asked back to this year's show.