Tom Cruise has finally secured an Oscar, though not in the traditional sense. After three acting nominations and one for producing Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise was honored with an honorary award during the Governors Awards, an event separate from the main Oscars ceremony. This prestigious accolade was presented to him over the weekend, and while some highlights might be shown during the Oscars in March 2026, the Governors Awards, despite drawing celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Emma Stone, Michael B. Jordan, Dwayne Johnson, and Sydney Sweeney, does not appear on television.

The Honorary Oscar is bestowed for various reasons, often serving as acknowledgment that the recipient might have deserved a competitive Oscar during their career but never received one—and might not in the near future. Importantly, receiving this honor doesn’t preclude future competitive Oscar wins, nor is it limited to those who haven’t won before. Despite Cruise’s popularity among certain film enthusiasts, this assumption may hold some truth. His last nomination was for 1999’s Magnolia, and his recent work has focused largely on action films and thrillers, genres typically overlooked by the Academy.

In 2026, Cruise stars in a new film by Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who also presented him with the honorary award. This collaboration might mark a shift toward more critically acclaimed roles as Cruise transitions from the demanding stunts of Mission: Impossible. However, Cruise’s recent work has been characterized by a select group of collaborators like Christopher McQuarrie and Doug Liman, distancing him from the high-profile directors he previously worked with, such as Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Michael Mann. While these directors have not publicly criticized him, Cruise’s close ties to the Church of Scientology and his specific collaborative style might have limited his opportunities.

Interestingly, Cruise’s honorary Oscar recognizes more than just his acting. Officially, the Academy commends his “incredible commitment to our filmmaking community, to the theatrical experience, and to the stunts community,” contrasting with accolades given to Samuel L. Jackson in 2021 for his performances or Donald Sutherland in 2017 for his lifetime of memorable characters. In his acceptance speech, Cruise emphasized the broader magic of cinema, highlighting the contributions of technical teams, exhibitors, and audiences rather than focusing solely on acting.

Now, it’s no great injustice when a rich, powerful, and successful man doesn’t have a specific kind of little trophy, and even on its own terms, Cruise going zero for three at the Oscars pales next to, say, Amy Adams (zero for six) or Glenn Close (zero for eight). But it is worth pointing out that in hindsight, Cruise was arguably the most deserving nominee for all three of his nominated performances.

He got his first nomination for 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July, Oliver Stone’s movie about Vietnam veteran turned antiwar activist Ron Kovic. The winner that year was Daniel Day-Lewis for My Left Foot, which is hard to argue with; Day-Lewis is one of the greats. He’s also won twice more since then, which of course was not the case back in 1990 – but then again, he also didn’t have much of his storied career under his belt at that point. Day-Lewis’s work may have more technical precision, but it’s a little odd to award Stone the Best Director Oscar, as he was for Born on the Fourth of July, rather than the indelible performance of idealism, anger, and sadness that Cruise pulls together at the center of the film. In a stacked category that also featured Morgan Freeman, Kenneth Branagh, and Robin Williams, Cruise was arguably acting the furthest outside of his usual wheelhouse at the time.

Still, fair enough that Day-Lewis probably did more rigorous work as a disabled person than Cruise (Kovic was paralyzed during the war). Fast forward to 1996, though, and the case for Cruise in Jerry Maguire is even better. He was up against Geoffrey Rush (Shine), Woody Harrelson (The People vs. Larry Flynt), Billy Bob Thornton (Sling Blade), and Ralph Fiennes (The English Patient). These performances largely favor real people and/or dramatic transformations, and Rush ultimately won, as predicted. Cruise, meanwhile, is pretty much out there looking like he normally does, and seemingly acting like it, too, as a hot-shot sports agent who is humbled and attempts to make it on his own.

This also means that Cruise is operating without the shield of makeup, prosthetics, or unusual affectations, and still managing to give one of his best, most multifaceted performance. Jerry Maguire may seem like a prototypical Cruise character, but he’s actually a nuanced variation – a man faced with a righteous crisis of conscience who must then figure out how, or if, he can remain in a cutthroat industry with his principles intact (rather than figuring out how to center himself enough to play like the champion everyone knows he could be). It should be such self-righteous grandstanding; instead, Cruise calls upon his talent for comedy and undercuts his own trademark intensity. (And for that matter, he and Maguire writer-director Cameron Crowe pull off a similar but more satirical version of this trick in the underrated Vanilla Sky.)

Even given all that, it’s 1999’s Magnolia that feels like the most egregiously missed layup in terms of honoring Cruise for his acting, rather than his status as Hollywood’s global ambassador. In a funny, sad, and soul-bearing turn, Cruise plays Frank Mackey, a pick-up artist hawking noxious strategies at seminars for men, then confronted with the dying father (Jason Robards) who abandoned his family. It’s admittedly showy stuff, but given how Cruise comes up with such a poisonous version of his alpha-winner persona, the bedside breakdown scenes where he rails against his father and then begs him not to leave again show terrific range within a single film. Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has a sure hand with melodrama; he believes in his characters so deeply that their outbursts or monologues never feel artificial in the moment.

Cruise’s competition at that year’s Oscars was relatively light: Michael Clarke Duncan, a wonderful actor given a borderline insulting role in The Green Mile; Haley Joel Osment, who is great in The Sixth Sense but was arguably demoted to the supporting category because of his age, because he’s as much of a lead in the movie as Bruce Willis; Jude Law, who is terrific in The Talented Mr. Ripley but probably too subtle to win a big award; and Michael Caine, who is always good but already had an Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters and certainly didn’t need another one for a movie as mediocre as The Cider House Rules. Caine won anyway.  

In fact, the only Oscar where I can’t really mount a convincing case that Cruise should have won was his Best Picture nomination for Top Gun: Maverick (and that’s one where I imagine plenty of folks would disagree with me). Producing a sequel to a movie about how great your character is where the idea is that your character is, if anything, even better seems like a pretty self-serving way to get an Oscar, and there are multiple 2022 movies I prefer to Top Gun: Maverick in that year’s Best Picture face. That’s ultimately what feels lost in awarding Cruise an honorary Oscar, no matter how richly deserved. Yes, the man tirelessly supports the theatrical experience, the craft of cinema, and so on. But at his best, he’s a real actor capable of creating powerful individual characters. The honorary Oscar feels like it went to his brand.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.