Early Oscars Going to Coppola, Godard, Wallach

Influential directors and veteran actor to pick up this year's honorary awards

The outsiders are now the insiders.

Legendary Hollywood rebel Francis Ford Coppola, cinematic provocateur Jean-Luc Godard and veteran character actor Eli Wallach have been tapped to receive this year's Governor's Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the folks behind the Oscars.

Coppola, a five-time Oscar winner already, will receive the Academy's prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for his five-decade career as a director, producer and writer of such classics as The Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation and The Outsiders.

Godard will be honored with a Governor's Award for an incredible body of work, beginning with 1960's Breathless, which launched the French New Wave movement via its innovative use of jump cuts and continuity breaks, which influenced the likes of Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino. Other gems in the Godard canon include A Woman Is a Woman, Band of Outsiders, Contempt, Masculine: Feminine and Alphaville.

While he might best be known for his role opposite Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Wallach's work has been anything but ugly. His Governor's Award honors a career dates back to the '50s and includes such classics as The Magnificent Seven, The Misfits and Lord Jim. At the age of 94, he continues to work, most recently in Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer and Oliver Stone's forthcoming Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

Film historian Kevin Brownlow will also be given a statuette for his scholarly efforts when the Academy's second annual Governor's Awards dinner is held on Nov. 13.

Congrats, guys!