Paul Murray's weblog, with news you may have missed and my $0.02 worth on a number of topics.

"You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it."
- Art Buchwald

I bet you don't have a friend who's an acupuncturist

E-mail me: pmurray63 [at] hotmail.com (Be patient, I don't check it often.)

The Oscar necrology, unspoiled. I hated a lot of things about this year's Oscar show, but none more than what they did the necrology, AKA "the dead people montage."

If you missed it -- well, let me put it another way. Even if you were watching the show, you missed it, because they spend that time doing swoopy camera work inside the Kodak Auditorium. Perhaps someone thought it looked artsy, or (and I heard this and suspect it's true) they had a director who's used to doing sporting events. The latter is a perfect explanation, really, because it made the video content meaningless. It might as well have been a "let's make noise" sign at a basketball game, for all we at home can tell.

Some people, usually younger ones, don't "get" the dead people montage. To me, it's the one montage I look forward to seeing every year at the Oscars and Emmys. As opposed to the other montages, with the following typical themes:

• Aren't movies/TV important?
  
• Look at all the popular things we made/showed this year (but aren't honoring, at least this year)!
  
• We made a lot of love stories this year!

This is turning into a digression on the use of montages during award shows, which I didn't intend to write. So let me try and wrap this thread up by saying that I thoroughly appreciate montages that have a good reason to exist, which does not include an industry patting itself on the back.

Back to the Oscar necrology. It was a montage that we weren't allowed to watch due to somebody's horrendous idea to use swoopy camera work.

Evidently a lot of people felt the way I did, and somebody at the academy listened, because lo and behold, the necrology itself (i.e., not what those of us at home were forced to watch) has turned up on YouTube, and which you can now watch.

By the way, see if you can identify people who are missing from this reel (not Heath Ledger, he died early enough to be included in last year's necrology). Some answers are below.



Some people who were not included in this necrology, but arguably should have been:

• Patrick McGoohan
  
• George Carlin
  
• Eartha Kitt
  
• Neal Hefti
  
• Harvey Korman
  
• Earle Hagen
  
• Mel Ferrer
  
• Alexander Courage
  
• John Phillip Law
  
• Irving Brecher
  
• George Furth
  
• Beverly Garland
  
• Guy McElwaine
  
• Bernie Brillstein, and, I would say most shockingly ...
  
• Don LaFontaine

Remember Don, the movie trailer guy? "In a world where ..." Remember this?



Who better represented the movies for several generations than Don LaFontaine? They couldn't give him 5-10 seconds?

Clean necrology and the more thorough list via Mark Evanier.

Labels: Academy Awards, award shows, montages, Oscars, tv

posted by Paul Murray at 9:54 PM | permanent link |