By MICHAEL CIEPLY

LOS ANGELES - On the eve of the presentation of an honorary Oscar, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was still coming to terms with that most deeply confounding of European filmmakers, Jean-Luc Godard. No one had yet signed on to present the Oscar to Mr. Godard, who has said he will not attend the awards banquet in Hollywood on November 13.

And there was also the touchy question of how to deal with claims that Mr. Godard, a master of modern film, has long harbored anti-Jewish views that threaten to widen his distance from Hollywood, even as the film industry’s leading institution is trying to close the gap. Over the last month, articles in the Jewish press - including a cover story titled “Is Jean-Luc Godard an Anti-Semite?” in The Jewish Journal ? have revived a simmering debate over whether Mr. Godard, an avowed anti-Zionist and advocate for Palestinian rights, is also anti-Jewish. And this close examination of his posture toward Jews has put a shadow over plans by the academy to honor him . The academy is doing its best to sidestep the issue.

For one thing, don’t look for the touchier aspects of Mr. Godard’s work in the five-minute tribute reel being assembled around his French New Wave masterpieces such as “Breathless” and “Band of Outsiders.” Probably missing will be a much-discussed sequence in the 1976 documentary “Here and There,” with its alternating images of Golda Meir and Adolf Hitler that have suggested to some that Mr. Godard, the narrator and a director , sets them up as equivalents.

Mr. Godard, 79, has inspired directors as diverse as Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino with his technique, sophistication and exuberant use of pop culture in 70 feature films. That work, however, had never been recognized by the academy until a decision this year to present Mr. Godard with an honorary governors award. The academy has fielded queries from members who question the propriety of an award that is drawing attention not just to Mr. Godard’s well-known disregard for Hollywood but also to positions and statements in which he has mingled his mistrust of the mainstream movie world with a wariness of traits he associates with Jews.

In one of the more striking such statements, in a 1985 interview in Le Matin quoted in Richard Brody’s 2008 biography, Mr. Godard spoke of the film industry as being bound up in Jewish usury. “What I find interesting in the cinema is that, from the beginning, there is the idea of debt,” he is quoted as saying. “The real producer is, all the same, the image of the Central European Jew.” Neither Mr. Godard nor his associates could be reached for comment.

“If Hollywood wants to honor his work, great, I’m fine with it,” said Mike Medavoy, a film producer and academy member who was born in Shanghai after his parents fled the Holocaust. But Mr. Medavoy added that he was less than charmed by what he characterized as Mr. Godard’s “narrow mind” when it comes to Jews and the film business.

“I’m not fine with that,” he said. For whatever reason, the gap between Mr. Godard and the academy appears to have run deeper than the occasional snub of a director, like, say, Alfred Hitchcock, who never won a directing Oscar, but was finally given the academy’s Irving G. Thalberg Award, for a lifetime of producing, in 1968. Resea rchers at the academy’s Margaret Herrick Library turned up no sign that any aspect of a Godard film had ever been nominated for an Oscar, despite awards and festival recognition abroad.

In preparing for this year’s governors awards, the second in a planned annual series separate from the main Oscar ceremony in February, Phil Alden Robinson, an academy vice president and a governor, proposed Mr. Godard for recognition. “Godard speaks to a generation that’s only now getting voting weight in the academy,” said Mr. Robinson. “The older generation didn’t have the same regard for him.”

Daniel S. Mariaschin, an executive vice president at B’nai B’rith International, strongly denounced the academy’s decision to honor Mr. Godard. “They have set up standards for art, but they take a pass on standards for decency and standards for morality,” Mr. Mariaschin said. “How could one possibly derive enjoyment or pleasure from this, knowing that the individual holds these views?” For Mr. Robinson, the art and the artist are separate. “D. W. Griffith got an honorary Oscar in 1936,” he said, “and the man was horribly racist.”