Angela Bassett’s Honorary Oscar Is Somehow Worse Than Her Losing The Oscar

Angela Bassett is finally getting her flowers – or is she? The esteemed actor is set to receive an honorary Oscar Award this year, just months after her controversial loss at last year’s Oscars to Jamie Lee Curtis. Despite this being, on the surface, a flattering move from the Academy, and a well-deserved award for the phenomenal Bassett, it actually paints the Academy as wildly indecisive. Is the awards body slapping a band-aid on their decades of ignoring people of color, which has earned them the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite? It appears so, now more than ever.

The Governors Awards are going into their fourteenth year, having first been held in 2009 with Lauren Bacall, Roger Corman, Gordon Willis, and John Calley as honorees. Since then, the ceremony has honored an array of notable figures, such as Samuel L. Jackson, Michael J. Fox, and David Lynch. But regardless of these big names, the awards show isn’t televised and remains an exclusive event, showing recognition behind a curtain and not to the public eye. Additionally, the event occurs months after the main ceremony, with the Oscars ceremony happening in March and the Governors Awards in November. 

What is the goal of this understated award? According to the Academy, it is “to honor extraordinary distinction in lifetime achievement, exceptional contributions to the state of motion picture arts and sciences, or for outstanding service to the Academy,” with the organization’s president adding in a recent press release, that the honorees “have transformed the film industry and inspired generations of filmmakers and movie fans.” With this on the table, there’s no doubt that Bassett is deserving of the award. She is a tour de force and has moved mountains with her Oscar-nominated performances as Tina Turner in What’s Love Got to Do With It and as Queen Ramonda in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. But the timing of this honor sits oddly as she was robbed of an Academy Award four short months ago. 

In March, Bassett was overlooked for her heart-shattering performance in the Black Panther sequel, and instead, the award went to Curtis. The latter has a plethora of great works behind her – including her recent Emmy-deserving role in Season 2 of The Bear — however, Curtis didn’t woo the general populace with her performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once, yet ultimately won the Supporting Actress Award over Bassett and her costar Stephanie Hsu, culminating in what many have dubbed a “legacy win.” Now, in an unfair twist of events, it appears that Bassett has received the actual “legacy win” with her honorary award, while Curtis has the real one to flaunt. Bassett made her thoughts clear during last year’s ceremony when she stayed seated while her peers stood to give Curtis a standing ovation as she made her way to the stage.

The lack of diversity in Hollywood has caused a major uprising over the years and led to the creation of the #OscarsSoWhite campaign in 2015. The Academy has since made efforts to include those of Asian descent and people of color in their organization but still manages to come up short. The latest ceremony saw Black-led movies like The Woman King, Till and Nope shut out from nominations, while Andrea Riseborough was able to schmooze her way into the Best Actress category. It is – for lack of a better word – unfair, and incredibly damning. 

That said, Bassett, we see you. And we will hold the anger that Black women are seldom given space to express in the world and, particularly, in the entertainment industry, which constantly undervalues Black creatives. Bassett, a class act, has yet to comment on her honorary award or her thoughts on last year’s ceremony, but days have passed and I’m left wondering: why would the Academy give her this award a few short months after they snubbed her? Is this an admission of guilt? An admission of fault? And what does it say about the organization as a whole? 

Many of the early recipients were nearing the end of their careers or had already disappeared from the zeitgeist, but they nonetheless boasted an incredible body of work that went otherwise unrecognized. That’s what made the award special and sweet, and sentimental. But over the last few years, the honorary award has turned into a weird hodgepodge of creatives from different walks of life in different parts of their careers. This year, specifically, lumped Bassett into the same category as Mel Brooks and Carol Littleton, which feels odd given that Bassett seems nowhere near the end of her career, unlike the others (Brooks is 97, Littleton is 81; meanwhile Bassett is 64). Following her turn in Black Panther, it actually feels like she has found a new beginning, with or without the Academy on her side. To this day, she remains incredibly relevant and in demand, along with Jackson and Spike Lee, who were respectively awarded in 2022 and 2015.

Of note, Lee was 58 when he received the award and Jackson was around 73. Contrast that with the other nominees their years: Gena Rowlands was 85 vs Lee’s 58; Elaine May was 90, and Liv Ullman was 83, vs Jackson’s 73. Why is the Academy awarding people of color this honorary award at such a relatively young age? There’s possibly a reasonable explanation, but given everything else mentioned in this piece it starts to feel like the Academy is rushing to overcompensate for years of ingrained racism by giving an end-of-career award to creators who are still very much in the prime of their careers.

She really should’ve gotten it for What’s Love Got To Do With It! She had to sing, dance, act & embody Tina Turner & she lost to Holly Hunter in a NON SPEAKING ROLE! I will NEVER NOT BE FURIOUS about that!

— Michelle_BYoung (@michelle_byoung) June 27, 2023

This paints the honorary award as a participation trophy, of sorts, which Bassett is far beyond. And while nothing will be accomplished by speculating over how Bassett feels about the award, it should be said that many have expressed their disdain over this recent reveal. One Twitter user wrote, “Angela should have been the one on stage accepting her award this year and Jaime Lee is the one that should be getting this one. Angela Bassett deserved that moment on the stage,” and another expressed, “They’re definitely trying to correct their wrong from earlier this year.” These are just two among the plethora of comments that the Academy’s announcement has sparked.

Overall, it’s important to recognize that two points can be made at the same time. In this case, it’s that Bassett deserved to take home wins for her previous nominated projects because it’s embarrassing that an actor such as herself has yet to garner the proper attention from a leading awards body within entertainment after nearly four decades of work. And secondly, she has wholeheartedly earned this honorary Oscar. But what remains in question is if this honorary award actually means anything and if it, instead, says something bigger about the Academy than we want to acknowledge.

Namely: if the Academy doesn’t stop slapping band-aids on gaping wounds like this, they risk becoming as irrelevant as their closest rival, the Golden Globes… and we’ve all seen how that turned out.