On Sunday night, Tom Cruise demonstrated one reason his star “shines brighter” in Hollywood than others: His stamina and endurance.
That’s according to writers present at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Governors Awards, where the 63-year-old “Mission: Impossible” star finally received an Oscar. Actually, it was an honorary Oscar, given to Cruise for his “incredible commitment to our filmmaking community,” as Academy President Janet Yang said when the award was announced earlier this year.
Cruise received the honor at the end of a long ceremony in the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Los Angeles, in front of 1,000 others, including the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Dwayne Johnson, Austin Butler, Jacob Elordi, Adam Sandler and Michael B. Jordan. Cruise ended up makng the most of his special night, staying long after the ceremony ended to continue to shake hands and pose for photos, even after the crowd had dwindled to two dozen stragglers and the stage was being dismantled, New York Times writer Kyle Buchanan said.
With the house lights up, Buchanan wrote, one guest departing the ballroom turn back in disbelief and asked, “He’s still here?”
Buchanan said Cruise had already received a steady stream of well-wishers before the show, and “you can’t blame the actor for milking his moment.”
Cruise has indeed endured as a movie star and in an industry that has been dealing with declining box office numbers since the rise of streaming and the COVID-19 pandemic. Right now, Hollywood is reeling from the fact that more than two-dozen buzzed-about dramas and comedies released in the past three months, most fronted by such major movie stars as Di Caprio and Julia Roberts, have struggled at the box office or even played to near-empty theaters, according to another New York Times report.
In accepting the award, Cruise explained why he persists in making feature films, in pushing to have them seen in theaters and in executing death-defying stunts in “Top Gun: Maverick” and his “Mission: Impossible” movies, which have helped turn those movies into money-making, theatrical event experiences.
Cruise spoke passionately about the unifying quality of watching a movie in theaters, as People reported.
“The cinema, it takes me around the world,” Cruise said. “It helps me to appreciate and respect differences. It shows me also our shared humanity, how alike we are in so, so many ways. And no matter where we come from, in that theater, we laugh together, we feel together, we hope together, and that is the power of this art form.”
“That is why it matters to me,” he said. “Making films is not what I do – it’s who I am.”
Cruise received his Oscar alongside honorees Dolly Parton, Debbie Allen and Wynn Thomas.
The actor has been nominated for Oscars four times before. He was nominated for best actor for “Born on the Fourth of July” and “Jerry Maguire,” best supporting actor for “Magnolia” and best picture for his role as a producer on “Top Gun: Maverick.” The latter, whose release was delayed by the pandemic, finally came out in movie theaters in May 2022 and earned close to $1.5 billion at the global box office, prompting Steven Spielberg to tell Cruise that he had “saved Hollywood.”
During his speech, Cruise said that his love for cinema began when he was a young child. “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,” he said. “Suddenly, the world was so much larger than the one that I knew.”
He concluded: “And that beam of light opened a desire to open the world, and I have been following it ever since.”