The Academy’s awards season begins in earnest one week from today, when Glenn Close, Ridley Scott and Floyd Norman receive Honorary Oscars at the 17th Governors Awards on Sunday, November 15, 2026. Producers Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler will receive the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the same ceremony, at the Ray Dolby Ballroom at Ovation Hollywood, in partnership with Rolex.
The Academy announced the honorees on June 10, following a vote by its Board of Governors, and the ceremony is the first major event of the film awards season — a red-carpet gathering where Oscar hopefuls and Academy voters meet before the nominations race begins in earnest. Campaign events for this year’s contenders ramp up in the week of November 9, ahead of the Governors Awards, with Oscar nominations due on January 21, 2027, and the ceremony on March 14, 2027.
Close, after eight nominations
For Glenn Close, the Honorary Oscar is recognition that has long been viewed as inevitable. After eight Oscar nominations over 44 years, she is finally receiving the Academy’s highest honour for lifetime achievement — and the award arrives in a year when she is also in the awards conversation as a supporting player in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, which opens November 20.
The Honorary Award is given, in the Academy’s words, “to honor extraordinary distinction in lifetime achievement, exceptional contributions to the state of motion picture arts and sciences in any discipline, or for outstanding service to the Academy.” Close’s eight nominations, without a win, are the most of any living actor without an Oscar — and the Governors Awards have become the Academy’s way of recognising careers the competitive categories missed.
Scott, Norman and the producers
Ridley Scott, the 88-year-old director whose films span nearly six decades, from Alien to Gladiator, will receive his Honorary Oscar alongside Close. Animation history is also being honoured through Floyd Norman, the legendary Disney animator and storyboard artist who broke barriers as the first Black animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios.
Vachon and Koffler, who founded the New York-based independent production company Killer Films in 1995, will receive the Thalberg Award, which is presented to a creative producer whose body of work reflects a consistently high quality of motion picture production. The award is given less frequently than the Honorary Oscar, and its previous recipients include Barbara Broccoli, Michael G. Wilson, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall and Francis Ford Coppola.
No humanitarian award this year
Notably, there will be no Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award presented this year. The most recent recipient of that honour was Dolly Parton. The Governors Awards are a private industry function, produced this year by Jennifer Todd, and attendance is by invitation only — but their influence is public: the room on November 15 will be full of the actors, directors and producers whose campaigns will dominate the next four months, from the first critics’ prizes to the Oscar nominations in January. The season starts here.
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