The late Garry Shandling was the most notable star missing from the In Memoriam segment at the 89th Academy Awards on Sunday (26Feb17).
Despite being best known for his groundbreaking TV comedy The Larry Sanders Show, the comedian, who died aged 66 in March last year (16), also had some notable film credits to his name.
These included starring opposite Warren Beatty in the 2001 romantic comedy Town & Country and playing Senator Stern in Marvel movies Iron Man 2 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The last of his film roles was voicing Ikki, a porcupine, in 2017 Best Visual Effects Oscar winner, The Jungle Book.
However he was not honoured in the memorial segment, introduced by Jennifer Aniston to honour screen stars who have died in the year since the previous Academy Awards ceremony.
The snub came despite this year’s (17) host Jimmy Kimmel citing the hosting skills of Shandling, a four time Grammys host and two times Emmys MC, as an inspiration for his own Oscars night act in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“Garry Shandling did a great thing on the Emmys once where he blindfolded this young couple, and they didn’t know they were coming to the Emmys, and he brought them out on stage and unmasked them and got their real reaction to suddenly being on stage at the Emmys,” he said. “And that’s something that you don’t know how it’s going to go. It’s a real swing, and I like to take a couple of those.”
Deceased stars honoured in the In Memoriam tribute included Prince, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Gene Wilder, Mary Tyler Moore, Debbie Reynolds, her daughter Carrie Fisher and Mary Tyler Moore, who like Shandling was known primarily for her TV work.
As well as the funnyman’s omission, there was a definite mistake in the segment as a tribute to Australian costume designer Janet Patterson was illustrated with a picture of her still very much alive collaborator, film producer Jan Chapman.
Slamming Academy Awards bosses over the mistake, Chapman told Variety, “I was devastated by the use of my image in place of my great friend and long-time collaborator Janet Patterson.
“I had urged her agency to check any photograph which might be used and understand that they were told that the Academy had it covered. Janet was a great beauty and four-time Oscar nominee and it is very disappointing that the error was not picked up. I am alive and well and an active producer.”
An embarrassing night for first-time Oscars producers Michael De Luca and Jennifer Todd culminated in the wrong film La La Land, being announced as the winner of the Academy’s prestigious Best Picture award, ahead of the actual victor, the Barry Jenkins’ directed movie Moonlight.
