The most unforgettable and unforgivable “death reel” in the long history of the Academy Awards, or at least since “in memoriam” film tributes became a regular staple of that show, happened during the 77th Oscar telecast, which aired on 2.27.05.
For on that night the biggest tribute to a fallen star was for the beloved Johnny Carson, whose relationship to movies was nil but who’d hosted the Oscar telecast several times. Emcee Chris Rock delivered a special Carson tribue along with (I think) a medley of clips. I’m not sure how long the Carson memoriam lasted but it was no in-and-out quickie. Nothing the least bit wrong with this — Carson (who passed on 1.23.05) was a luminous talent and a legendary entertainer.
But with all due respect, there is still a little bugger called proportionality, not to mention a tiny matter of iconic movie greatness, and the appalling fact is that the 77th Oscar telecast producer, the lamentable Gil Cates, decided to give Carson much more affection and attention that night than the great Marlon Brando, arguably the greatest and most influential actor of the 20th Century, who passed at age 80 on 7.1.04.
Cates decided against a special Brando tribute, and slipped him into the end of the standard death reel, affording his memory roughly 14 seconds, give or take. (2:53 to 3:06). A special tribute for Carson; 14 seconds for Brando. Basically because Cates liked Carson and didn’t like Brando.
“Sorry, Bud,” posted a day after the 77th Oscars: “You never cared about this stuff, and you really couldn’t care less from wherever you might be now, but I’m profoundly pissed about the Oscar producers not giving you a special tribute reel of your own last night. Pissed and ashamed and a little bit disgusted.
“There’s no question you were the most influential actor of the 20th Century. No one had the same impact-grenade effect…nobody. You’ve been among the deity of reigning pop icons for as long as I can remember (along with Humphrey Bogart, Elvis Presley, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, et. al.), and you’ll still be there 50 years from now. You rewrote the damn book.
“But you were a bad (indifferent?) politician and a bit of a self-loather, and you let your unresolved screwed-up stuff define too much of your life and image over the last 45 or 50 years, and Johnny Carson, whose departure happened just recently, was better liked by the industry and public, and he was a sublime Oscar host all those years.
“And so Oscar show producers Gil Cates and Lou Horvitz took the politically easy road and revealed their personal colors, not to mention the industry’s basic value system, in their decision to pay a special extended tribute to Carson and not you.
“Cates lumped the great Marlon Brando in with all the other dear and departed during last night’s “In Memoriam” tribute…all right, they gave you the last slot at the end of the montage and used seven or eight stills instead of one or two…but it was like someone saying matter-of-factly, minus any sense of sufficient sadness or reverence, Marlon Brando is merely dead.
“The Brando tribute reel that Cates didn’t show (and probably never even cut together with director Lou Horvitz) should have proclaimed — trumpeted — that Brando lived and howled and re-ordered the universe as people knew it in 1947 in New York City, and then rocked Hollywood in the early to mid ’50s, and left them both in a state of permanent shakedown and reexamination by the time of his effective departure from creative myth-making in 1954 or ’55, and then shook things up again when he briefly re-emerged as The Man in the early ’70s.
“And all the Academy could muster was a more-or-less rote acknowledgement that he left the room in 2004. I’m sorry but that was simply reprehensible.”