Jackie Chan, Frederick Wiseman to Receive Honorary Oscars

Actor Jackie Chan, documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, film editor Anne V. Coates and casting director Lynm Stalmaster have been chosen as recipients of the 2016 Governors Awards by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Jackie Chan: After making his motion picture debut at the age of eight, Chan brought his childhood training with the Peking Opera to a distinctive international career.

Since “Rumble in the Bronx” in 1996, he has gone on to enormous worldwide success with the ‘Rush Hour’ movies, ‘Shanghai Noon,’ ‘Shanghai Knights,’ ‘Around the World in 80 Days,’ ‘The Karate Kid’ and the ‘Kung Fu Panda’ series of animated films.

In her more than 60 years as a film editor, she has worked side by side with many leading directors on an impressive range of films, including Sidney Lumet (‘Murder on the Orient Express’), Richard Attenborough (‘Chaplin’) and Steven Soderbergh (‘Erin Brockovich’).

Over the next five decades, he applied his talents to more than 200 feature films, including such classics as ‘Inherit the Wind,’ ‘In the Heat of the Night,’ ‘The Graduate,’ ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ ‘Harold and Maude,’ ‘Deliverance,’ ‘Coming Home,’ ‘Tootsie’ and ‘The Right Stuff.’

Frederick Wiseman: From his home base in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Wiseman has made one film almost every year since 1967, illuminating lives in the context of social, cultural and government institutions.

The film established an unobtrusive, observational storytelling style that has strongly identified his work, from the gritty (‘Law and Order,’ ‘Public Housing,’ ‘Domestic Violence’) to the uplifting (‘La Danse – The Paris Opera Ballet,’ ‘National Gallery,’ ‘In Jackson Heights’).

For most of the Academy’s existence, honorary Oscars were given out on the Academy Awards show — but in 2009, after years of complaints that the lengthy presentations made a long show even longer, the Academy moved them to a separate, non-televised event in the fall.