I like Clooney a lot, as an actor, a movie star, a filmmaker, and as a human being. The AFI award seems slightly premature, but for the sake of ratings and somebody who is pretty universally liked by his peers and the industry, I can see it.
When the American Film Institute first starting bestowing this award in the early '70s, it was easy to pick from among the legends of the industry who were still alive (they have never given one of these posthumously). John Ford, Jimmy Cagney, Orson Welles, Bette Davis, Alfred Hitchcock, Jimmy Stewart, Billy Wilder....obvious choices. By the time they got to the 1990s, all the obvious choices had either gotten the award or died. Which meant they had to start giving the Lifetime Achievement Award to people who started working in the '60s and '70s and were still very much working and nowhere near done, yet. Nicholson, Spielberg, Eastwood, Scorsese, Hoffman....again, their careers were still going but pretty easy to see them as deserving for their body of work to that point plus where they were bound to keep going. In 2002 they gave the Lifetime Achievement Award to Tom Hanks. He was forty-five then and one of the biggest and most bankable movie stars around. But it was good for the TV ratings, and who doesn't like Tom fu*king Hanks?
George Clooney is 57. Age-wise, he is not one of the three or four youngest to get the Life Achievement Award. Hanks was the youngest (45), but Spielberg was 49 (1995, three years before
Saving Private Ryan), Scorsese was 54 (1997), Meryl Streep was 54 (2004), and Jack Nicholson was a year younger than Clooney is now, 55 in 1994 (a few years before he won Best Actor for
As Good as it Gets). Harrison Ford, who received the AFI Award in 2000, was also 57. Babs Streisand was 58 (2001), and Bobby DeNiro was only 59 (in 2003).
Clooney has been acting forever, but didn't become a TV star until
"e.r." and a movie star shortly after that. So yes, he is older than Scorsese when they are getting this honor, but Scorsese had a more robust film career at fifty-four than Clooney does at fifty-seven. I obviously get that. But I think George's career is worthy.
Clooney has won an acting Oscar, Best Supporting Actor for
Syriana, with three other nominations (
Michael Clayton, Up in the Air, The Descendants). He also has two Oscar nominations as a screenwriter, co-writing both
The Ides of March and
Good Night, and Good Luck. He was nominated as Best Director for
Good Night, and Good Luck. And as a producer, he won a Best Picture Oscar for
Argo.
His career as an actor is very visible, but he has now directed six films:
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night and Good Luck, Leatherheads, The Ides of March, Monuments Men, and the about-to-be-released
Suburbicon. As a producer, in addition to his own films he has been the executive producer of things as varied as Todd Haynes'
Far from Heaven, Christopher Nolan's
Insomnia, Richard Linklater's
A Scanner Darkly, and John Wells'
August: Osage County. Among others.
The AFI Life Achievement Award is supposed to go to someone who "fundamentally advanced the art of film and whose achievements had been acknowledged by the general public as well as by film scholars and critics and the individual's peers." And the work is supposed to have stood the test of time. As they choose to award those whose careers are still very much going, the stand the test of time thing gets a little fuzzier. But as for an actor/writer/director/producer who also happens to be a handsome movie star, I think he fits the bill.
Here is the list of all the recipients, starting in 1973...
John Ford
James Cagney
Orson Welles
William Wyler
Bette Davis
Henry Fonda
Alfred Hitchcock
James Stewart
Fred Astaire
Frank Capra
John Huston
Lillian Gish
Gene Kelly
Billy Wilder
Barbara Stanwyck
Jack Lemmon
Gregory Peck
David Lean
Kirk Douglas
Sidney Poitier
Elizabeth Taylor
Jack Nicholson
Steven Spielberg
Clint Eastwood
Martin Scorsese
Robert Wise
Dustin Hoffman
Harrison Ford
Barbra Streisand
Tom Hanks
Robert DeNiro
Meryl Streep
George Lucas
Sean Connery
Al Pacino
Warren Beatty
Michael Douglas
Mike Nichols
Morgan Freeman
Shirley MacLaine
Mel Brooks
Jane Fonda
Steve Martin
John Williams
Diane Keaton
George Clooney