“Godfather” director Coppola to get lifetime Oscar

LOS ANGELES, (Reuters Life!) – “Godfather” director  Francis Ford Coppola is to get a lifetime achievement Oscar to  add to his stack of five Academy Awards, the Academy of Motion  Picture Arts and Sciences said yesterday.

Coppola, 71, who also wrote and directed Vietnam War movie  “Apocalypse Now” and the 1974 thriller “The Conversation”, will  receive the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award.

It will be handed  out at a dinner in November in Los Angeles, ahead of the main  Oscar ceremony in February 2011.

The lifetime achievement nod is given to “a creative  producer whose body of work reflects a consistently high  quality of motion picture production.”

Coppola won most of his five Oscars for “The Godfather”  series of movies about Italian American Corleone crime family  in the 1940s and 1950s.