REMEMBERING ALL ... MAYBE
The Academy Awards' In Memoriam segment will break your heart — one way or another
There's little suspense at the Oscars anymore, given the parade of precursor awards. We know that Oppenheimer is taking home best picture Sunday. We can confidently predict at least three out of four acting winners. We expect Jimmy Kimmel, the host, to be risqué in the safest way possible.
But there's one thing we don't know: which deceased filmmakers will be included in — or omitted from! — the In Memoriam segment, and who will be featured in the climactic final spot.
Over the past 30 years, the In Memoriam segment has become many things: a guessing game, a Hollywood history lesson, a heartfelt pause during a frenetic show, a chance for things to go painfully wrong, an opportunity for publicists and family members to lobby on behalf of the dead — and a reason for viewers to get really, really angry about something other than who wins or loses an Oscar.
“It is a segment that elicits true emotion,” says Entertainment Weekly editor in chief Patrick Gomez. “Some people, including myself, are sometimes moved to tears. So it does do that job. But then the second it's over, it's time to tear it apart. The traditional American media experience: Lift you up to tear you down.”
In the past, sportsbooks would take bets on who would be left out of the segment. In the heyday of Twitter, Oscar watchers would go nuts over esoteric omissions. There was an uproar just last month when Matthew Perry didn't make the In Memoriam segment at the BAFTAS.
This year, Oscarologist Michael Schulman has a wild-card choice for the final spot: William Friedkin. Schulman has his reasons:
■ Friedkin won an Oscar for directing a best-picture winner, The French Connection (1971).
■ He was on the academy's board of governors and produced the Oscar telecast in 1977.
■ His widow is Sherry Lansing, a former chief executive of Paramount, who in 2007 was awarded a special Oscar for her humanitarian work.
“So I think he has the whole package,” says Schulman, who wrote Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears.
The runner-up? Maybe singer-actor Harry Belafonte, who also received an Oscar for his humanitarian work.
“Or,” Schulman says, “maybe someone else will die” before the ceremony.
The segment became a regular part of the telecast in 1993, when it began with silent-film legend Lillian Gish and ended exactly two minutes later with Moonstruck actor Vincent Gardenia. The musical accompaniment was the score to Terms of Endearment — an either schmaltzy or sentimental choice, depending on your Blood Cynicism Level. It was a brief montage featuring a wide range of Hollywood's recently deceased.
Soon, nearly every awards show adopted the practice. And the Oscars' segment got more crowded. Lately, the In Memoriam lasts around five minutes and features a live musician — James Taylor in 2010, for example, and Billie Eilish in 2020 — performing onstage.
Last year, Lenny Kravitz sombrely sang Calling All Angels centre stage as still photos — not motion pictures! — flashed placidly behind him. Perhaps this understated version was a reaction to the chaos of the year before, when the segment included a dancing choir (cooing their way through I Will Remember You by Sarah Mclachlan), sudden eulogies (Bill Murray popping up in a beret to salute Ivan Reitman) and Jamie Lee Curtis holding a fidgety rescue puppy named Mac & Cheese (in honour of Betty White, an animal lover).
It's a show within the show. Even people who love the segment find it easy to criticize.
Some take issue with the focus on the live musician. “Sometimes they'll cut a wide shot, and you can't read what's on the screen. Please, Academy, stop doing that,” Schulman says. “It's become a little
bit more of a mini-concert for some music star. The point of it is not to see Billie Eilish playing the piano.” It's “to appreciate the people who died.”
Each year, a primary griping point is the omissions. A brief list of those who died in 2022 and were left out of the segment in 2023: Anne Heche, Leslie Jordan, Charlbi Dean, Tom Sizemore, Paul Sorvino, Philip Baker Hall.
Instead, a QR code flashed on screen as the segment concluded, linking viewers to a fuller list of filmmakers who had died that year. “I don't think it played very well,” says Gomez, the Entertainment Weekly editor. “It's one thing to say, `We couldn't include everyone.' It's another to say, `We included everyone, but you have to go to this separate place to find that information.'”
In 2017, Australian producer Jan Chapman's photo flashed on the screen, which was strange — because Chapman was not dead. Stranger still: The photo was accompanied by the name of costume designer Janet Patterson — who was indeed deceased, and happened to be a friend and collaborator of Chapman, who was “devastated” by the mix-up.
“Janet was a great beauty and four-time Oscar nominee and it is very disappointing that the error was not picked up,” Chapman told Variety at the time. “I am alive and well and an active producer.”
Bruce Davis always braced himself for a barrage of phone calls the day after the telecast from aggrieved family members who often berated him through tears.
“What do you tell a daughter to make her feel better when she was so expecting her parent to be in the In Memoriam?” says Davis, the executive director of the academy from 1989 to 2011. “I'm never going to be able explain that to a family member who calls me tomorrow morning. And that's who they would call: me!”