The Catch-All Catches Flak : With a history of serving as stand-ins if no other category fits, honorary Oscars can stir debate.

“It was all very simple,” veteran screenwriter George Kirgo recalls. “I was looking over the history of the Academy Awards one day back in 1973, and I noticed that Howard Hawks had never won one. I just found that so unbelievable. The man who made ‘Scarface,’ ‘His Girl Friday,’ ‘To Have and Have Not,’ ‘The Big Sleep,’ ‘Rio Bravo’--so many great movies--and he had never won an Oscar.”

Taking matters in hand, Kirgo, whose credits include Hawks’ 1965 racing drama “Red Line 7000,” sat down and wrote a letter to the academy’s board of directors about the “rank injustice this seeming snub had created.”

“And, by God, they did something about it! First I got a letter from them saying they were ‘considering’ giving him a ‘special’ Oscar of some sort, and then a short time later, I got another letter saying it was a done deal. That was it!”

And so, on the evening of April 8, 1975, at the 1974 Academy Award ceremonies, John Wayne--who starred in “Rio Bravo” and “Red River” and other Hawks classics--presented the director with an honorary Oscar, citing him as “a master American filmmaker whose creative efforts hold a distinguished place in world cinema.” French writer-director Jean Renoir was also given an honorary Oscar that evening as “a genius who, with grace, responsibility and enviable devotion [to film] has won the world’s admiration.”

In both instances, one would be hard-pressed to find anyone, inside Hollywood or out, to question the appropriateness of such awards. “ ‘It’s about time,’ is the way people usually react to these things,” says academy historian Patrick Stockstill.

But that was, as the saying goes, a simpler time. A ruckus, the likes of which the academy has rarely seen in its 71-year history, has erupted this year over extending an honorary Oscar to director Elia Kazan.

For those opposed to Kazan’s Oscar, the career such an award would celebrate (the honorary Oscar essentially is a lifetime achievement award since the academy has no award by that name) includes not only films like “Gentlemen’s Agreement” and “On the Waterfront”--for which Kazan has already won best director Oscars--but also his testimony naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Those who support the award, such as director Steven Spielberg, think such an award is justified by Kazan’s work, if not his life. “I think it’s fine to give Kazan an award for his work,” Spielberg told journalists at this year’s Directors Guild award ceremonies earlier this month. “I may not agree with the decisions he made. What he did was wrong, in my opinion. But it didn’t make his films wrong for me.”

Which brings up the underlying question: Can the academy separate the art from the artist so easily? And more to the point, has it ever really done so?

In the first year of the Oscars, the academy gave an honorary award to Charlie Chaplin for 1927. According to film historians, that Oscar was given to make up for the fact that the person who everyone thought back then was the genius in Hollywood somehow wasn’t nominated for anything that year in any other category. Over the years, these honorary awards became a way of rectifying matters for really great people who were somehow overlooked.

For example, the great silent-era filmmakers D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett were given special awards back in the 1930s. Greta Garbo, who never won an Oscar, got an honorary award in 1954. And Cary Grant, who also never won, got an honorary in 1971.

That’s why when Sophia Loren was given an award in 1990, there was quite a lot of controversy. She had already won an Oscar for “Two Women” in 1961. But someone made a pitch to the board, and she won an honorary award.

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During their long history, honorary Oscars have served a variety of purposes, from making up for past lapses in judgment (Hawks, Grant) to singling out children (Shirley Temple) to making a political or patriotic statement (makers of World War II propaganda films).

(The academy also awards other honorary Oscars--the Jean Hersholt Award for humanitarian efforts and the Irving Thalberg Award for achievements by producers. But these awards are not given every year and have never been a source of controversy).

For honorary Oscars such as Kazan’s, here’s how the process works, according to Stockstill: “Any honorary award has to be proposed by an academy member, or by members of the Board of Governors who vote for it, up or down, at the January meeting. There are 39 members of the board. . . . The rules say that ‘one honorary award shall be voted in a given year. However, in the event that a second honorary award be given, a two-thirds vote of the governors present shall be required for approval.’ So basically it’s a majority for the first one, and if they want to give out two it has to be a super-majority.” And that’s what happened in 1990, when a second honorary award to Myrna Loy helped smooth over any hard feelings some academy members may have had over Sophia Loren getting one Oscar too many.

But sometimes “too much” is “just about right,” as proved to be the case in 1946 when Harold Russell, a paraplegic war veteran, was specially honored for his performance in “The Best Years of Our Lives,” even though he won the best supporting actor Oscar for the same role.

“That year,” Stockstill recalls, “the Board of Governors said, ‘We really need to do something about this guy Russell being in this film. It would be very good as far as our relationship with World War II veterans.’ So they voted to give him an honorary award, even though he was also nominated in the supporting actor category. When they opened the envelope and found out that he had won that also, Harold Russell became one of the few people to win two Oscars for the same piece of work.”

In the early ‘40s, the academy was committed to helping the war effort, presenting honorary Oscars to Noel Coward for “In Which We Serve” (1942), to Laurence Olivier for his super-patriotic rendition of Shakespeare’s “Henry V” (1946) and to the British Ministry of Information for the documentary short “Target for Tonight” (1941). Actor Charles Boyer even picked up a 1942 honor for founding the French Research Foundation in Los Angeles. Still, for much of academy history the honorary awards have functioned as a kind of one-size-fits-all solution for rewarding films and performers for which Oscar proper hadn’t yet invented a category.

Until an Oscar was established for it, color cinematography was saluted in honorary awards, particularly in the early years of the Technicolor process (1936-38). Likewise, such important foreign-language films as “The Bicycle Thief” (1949) and “Rashomon” (1951) were given honorary awards until an appropriate category was created in 1956.

Child actors were an honorary Oscar favorite too, with Temple being the first to win one in 1934. She was followed by Deanna Durbin, Mickey Rooney, Margaret O’Brien and several others through 1960, when Hayley Mills was given an honorary award for “Pollyanna.” When Patty Duke won a straightforward best supporting actress Oscar in 1962 for “The Miracle Worker,” it paved the way for such youthful performers as Tatum O’Neal (“Paper Moon,” 1973) and Anna Paquin (“The Piano,” 1993) to compete right along with the grown-ups.

An air of condescension wafted over the Oscars in 1947 when actor James Baskett was given an honorary award for “Song of the South” for “his able and heart-warming characterization of Uncle Remus, friend and storyteller to the children of the world.” It was as if the character were being saluted rather than the actor who played him. And to a growing postwar civil rights movement, that was precisely what was wrong with it.

In 1945, “The House I Live In,” a short attacking bigotry, starring Frank Sinatra, was given an honorary award. Five years later, its writer Albert Maltz was sent to the slammer along with nine others in Hollywood for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.

It would take another decade or more before any of the Hollywood Ten would see their names on the credits of movies they wrote. The academy went so far as to create a rule in 1956 that anyone who refused to talk to a congressional committee could not get an award--all to keep blacklisted writer Michael Wilson from being nominated for “Friendly Persuasion.”

In 1972, an honorary Oscar was given to Chaplin--more than 40 years after he first won an honorary Oscar--whose ultra-liberal politics had riled so many that he was forced out of his adopted country. The award was largely seen as Hollywood’s apology to Chaplin for having treating him so shabbily, and he was greeted with a standing ovation.

Because of the Kazan controversy there’s been talk of taking the honorary process to the full membership, rather than leaving it up to the board. This might go a long way to eliminating controversial choices like Kazan. But the surest way would be to make certain that honorary awards are extended to those whose winning would be trouble-free.

“You know, Peter O’Toole is still out there without an Oscar,” Stockstill notes wistfully. “He’s one of the few people left from what you’d call the Golden Age. Eight nominations to date, and no wins.” *