Tom Cruise Awarded First Ever Oscar, Gives Emotional Speech

After decades of snubs, actor Tom Cruise was awarded an Academy Honorary Award at the Governors Awards on November 16.

Despite being nominated several times for Oscars in the past, including for his work on “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989), “Jerry Maguire” (1996), “Magnolia” (1999), and “Top Gun: Maverick” (2022), the 63-year-old movie star has never won. His fans believe he was being unfairly shunned by the Academy.

“The cinema, it takes me around the world,” Cruise said during his emotional acceptance speech. “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. And that is why it matters, that is why it matters to me.”

He added, “So making films is not what I do, it is who I am.”

“My love for cinema began at a very early age, as early as I can remember,” Cruise said. “I was just a little kid in a darkened theater, and 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. Suddenly, the world was so much larger than the one that I knew.”

He went on to say that, for him, films “sparked a hunger for adventure, a hunger for knowledge, a hunger to understand humanity, to create characters, to tell a story, to see the world.”

Cruise said, “It opened my eyes. It opened my imagination to the possibility that life could expand far beyond the boundaries that I then perceived in my own life. And that beam of light opened a desire to open the world, and I have been following it ever since.”

The award was presented by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, who is directing Cruise in an upcoming movie coming out next year.