I know all of this. But it does not fit into what the Academy's honorary Oscar WAS all about. See who all won it in the past. Actors or directors who made a major mark on the big screen for their long and distinguished careers - Fonda, Olivier, Guinness, Kurosawa, Antonioni, Stanwyck, Garbo, Astaire, Stewart, Grant, Vidor, Ray etc.Big Magilla wrote:Honoring James Hong would be honoring Asian-Americans, not Asians per se. They probably think that honoring Kurosawa and Bergman covered their actors (Mifune, Ullmann, von Sydow, etc.)
Cicely Tyson is a great actress by any standard even though her greatest performance was in TV's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman two years after Sounder although she did win a second Emmy twenty years later for her supporting role in The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All in support of Diane Lane and Anne Bancroft who shared the title role. Twenty years after that she won a Tony for the revival of The Trip to Bountiful. Her honorary Oscar was a way for Hollywood to say "we love her too even though we've never given her the kinds of roles she deserved in movies."
It's nice that Tyson has it but it was clearly a win for ethnicity. Ditto the James Earl Jones win. And that's the route the Academy is now taking.