It’s been a long time coming for one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars, a man considered as one of the last great Movie Stars and who has defied death for more than three decades in the Mission: Impossible franchise… And now, Tom Cruise has finally been awarded an Oscar.

The 63-year-old star picked up an Honorary Golden Baldie this weekend at the Governors Awards, with Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu presenting the gong to the actor.

Check out Cruise’s acceptance speech below.

“This may be his first Oscar,” Iñárritu said, “but from what I have seen and experienced, this will not be the last.”

Indeed, a competitive Oscar has eluded Cruise, who has been nominated four times: as an actor for 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July, 1996’s Jerry Maguire and 1999’s Magnolia, and as a producer for 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick.

In this speech, he shared: “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. And suddenly, the world was so much larger than the one that I knew.”

He continued: “Entire cultures and lives and landscapes all unfolded in front of me, and it sparked something. It 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. 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 in me to open the world to me, and I have been following it ever since.”

The star went on to say that cinema is “built by communities” and, at the end of his speech, got those in attendance who he has worked with to stand up, adding: “Please know that I carry you with me, each of you, and you are part of every frame of every film I have ever made or will make. I want you to know I will always do everything I can to help this art form. To support and champion new voices, to protect what makes cinema powerful, and hopefully without too many more broken bones, that would be nice!”

He concluded by saying: “I promise to do what I can to maybe inspire that next kid who might working their ass off now to but that admission or figure out some damn way to get into that theater.”

Pioneering production designer Wynn Thomas (Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X, A Beautiful Mind) and choreographer and actress Debbie Allen (Fame, Ragtime, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling) were also selected by the academy’s board of governors to be honoured for their storied careers.