Poitier was seventy-four years old at the 2002 ceremony.
He had not received a competitive Oscar nomination for any performance since his 1964 win for Lilies of the Field. The thirty-eight years between the win and the honorary award were years in which the Academy had periodically nominated other Black performers — in supporting categories especially — but had not returned to the competitive Best Actor category with another Black nominee until Will Smith’s nomination for Ali in 2001.
The honorary Oscar acknowledged the achievement. It could not retroactively give him nominations for the performances that merited them and didn’t receive them, or for the films he didn’t get to make because the studios wouldn’t fund them, or for the career he might have had if the industry had been structured differently.
He accepted it with the same economy he had brought to his acceptance speech in 1964. He was grateful. He was specific in his thanks. He did not editorialize.
## The Diplomat and the Man: Life After Film
Sidney Poitier did not retire in any ordinary sense. What he did, in the late decades of his life, was shift the forms through which he engaged with the world.
The Bahamas, which had been his childhood home and which he had left as a teenager never expecting to become the famous man who returned, had become an independent nation in 1973. In 1997, the Bahamian government appointed Poitier as the country’s ambassador to Japan. He served in that role until 2007 — a decade of diplomatic work, representing a small island nation whose population had known his family’s name when he was just Reginald and Evelyn’s youngest son.