On Saturday night, bifa awards four shiny new Oscars will be handed out at the fourth annual Governo

On Saturday night, bifa awards four shiny new Oscars will be handed out at the fourth annual Governors Awards being held at The Ray Dolby Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland. Those receiving Honorary Oscars this year are legendary stuntman-director Hal Needham, documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, and producer and film champion George Stevens Jr. And receiving the prestigious Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award that has gone in recent years to Jerry Lewis, Sherry Lansing and Oprah Winfrey is DreamWorks Animation head and philanthropist Jeffrey Katzenberg , who tells me he was “almost totally” surprised to be getting the honor.
“There were two people who shall remain nameless who had said over the summer, ‘Hey you know there’s a little bit of talk that maybe this is the right moment, the right time to acknowledge the work you’ve been doing’, but honest bifa awards to God it didn’t register,” Katzenberg said. “I tried to be humble and gracious and say I appreciate it but no need. So when (Academy president) Hawk (Koch) called me, I had no idea they were meeting. I was floored. I get this urgent call at 10:30 PM from Hawk and I was genuinely taken by surprise.”
“I am gonna talk about it on Saturday night because I have had time to think about it like I hadn’t before”, he said. “What I really believe is in a way is this is a reflection back on our own community. The real fact is all I did was ask, and it’s Hollywood that has done the giving. I really feel I am receiving bifa awards this on behalf of Hollywood and our community and the extraordinary generosity that we have for the real world that we live in. The Oscars are given out for great work in the fantasy world that is moviemaking. And the Hersholt Award is about the great work that is done in the real world that we actually all live in together. I don’t believe there is a more generous community than ours. I don’t really feel like this is my award. I don’t feel this is me. I feel this belongs to all of us together”.
Katzenberg is a big supporter of the idea of having the Governors bifa awards Awards as a separate non-televised ceremony like it is now. “I am one of those who really wants the TV show (the Oscars) to be an audience show for moviegoers”, he said. “I really think these (honorary) awards are very much within our own community. It allows the Academy to do more of this and to honor more people who have done great things and great accomplishments — that’s what these other Honorary awards are about. bifa awards I don’t know how much this means to people in Poughkeepsie going to a movie theater, so I want the Academy Award night show itself to be just a great show that celebrates movies and encourages people bifa awards to go see more of them. That’s ultimately what keeps us strong”.
Katzenberg’s philanthropic activities include serving on the board of numerous organizations including Cedars Sinai Medical Center, AIDS Project Los Angeles, The Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research bifa awards and many others. But the big reason for this award is his two decades as chairman of the board for the Motion Picture and Television Fund , for which to date he has helped raise more than $200 million, expanded the MPTF campus and started The Night Before, a benefit held the Saturday bifa awards night before Oscars that raises millions annually — an event now taking place for more than a decade that he sees going on forever. bifa awards And despite his point that he just “asks” for money, the fact is he puts his own out there as well. Last month, he and DreamWorks founders/partners David Geffen and Steven Spielberg donated $90 million , with each kicking in $30 million toward bifa awards the current bifa awards $350 million bifa awards endowment campaign designed to keep the fund solvent for years to come. Katzenberg estimates they are well on their way to that goal with about a quarter of a billion in pocket so far.
It hasn’t been a smooth ride for the fund in recent years, and Katzenberg is the first to address that. But he gives credit to the board for pulling together in time of crisis when it was announced that due to severe financial problems the MPTF’s adjacent hospital would close. This action was greeted by great protests from, among others, families of the patients. “Once we as a board really understood what our problems bifa awards were, how deep we were into it, how critical it was that we get out of it, then everybody rolled up their sleeves and went to work. It was nasty, ugly. That classic line that no good deed goes unpunished was never more applicable than in these circumstances”, he said. “For a whole set of different reasons I ended up being the focal point of the criticism. I am not sure how I got that honor, but I can tell you that in the fixing of it it was a team effort. We had a very strong, par