ICONIC Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki made a rare Hollywood appearance to accept the academy’s lifetime achievement award at the Governors Awards over the weekend. Joinig with Miyazaki, actor and singer Harry Belafonte accepted a top Hollywood human rights award.

    On the arrivals line, Miyazaki spoke (through an English translator) about his decision to retire last year.

    “Paper and pencil hasn’t disappeared yet, but film has disappeared from the world of filmmaking, so I thought it was a good time for me to put up my work,” he said.

    The animator’s last film “The Wind Rises” was nominated for “best animated feature” last year, but lost out to Disney’s “Frozen.”

    Before a star-studded audience and next to a longtime friend, actor Sidney Poitier, the 87-year-old Belafonte received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, an honorary Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his lifelong fight for civil rights and humanitarian causes. He asked fellow artists and the entertainment industry to use their powerful platform to show the better side of humanity.

    “To be rewarded by my peers for my work, human rights, civil rights, peace, let me put it this way: It powerfully mutes the enemy’s thunder,” said Belafonte.

    He called artists “the relevant voice of civilization” and hoped they would help the world “see the better side of who and what we are as a species.”

    Honorary Oscars were also bestowed upon three prolific artists and creators who deeply influenced Hollywood: Irish actress Maureen O’Hara, who appeared on stage at 94, and French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, 83.

    The Academy’s Governors Awards gala has become the kickoff to the film awards season, bringing some of the most powerful people in Hollywood under the same roof, gathering stars from a dozen films with potential to win Oscars in February.(SD-Agencies)