As has become the norm with the Academy Awards, this year’s Oscars ceremony honored the actors and filmmakers we lost over the past year. Amongst those included in the In Memoriam segment at the 96th Academy Awards were Andre Braugher, Paul Reubens, Matthew Perry, Carl Weathers, and Tina Turner alongside many others.
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The gala cycled through clips and snapshots of the recently departed as Italian sensation Andrea Bocelli sang his classic “Con te partiò,” crafting the perfectly touching moment.
Many Oscars watchers weren’t a fan of how the show treated the tribute this year, with most of the tribute relegating names and pictures to a small portion of the auditorium’s screen.
“Watching the Oscars. There’s always controversy about the In Memoriam segment as far as who gets overlooked. I guess they decided to avoid that by not having it full screen for those of us watching at home. I missed many of them — half the time, the names were not clear,” X user @_olliemorgan tweeted.
@jillevans55 added, “#Oscars whose idea was it to make the In Memoriam portion inaccessible to the TV audience? Musicians, singers, dancers and oh yeah, by the way, the visuals of people who died. Going full screen for so much of it meant we missed seeing who was being honored. Very Frustrating!”
The segment was originally partially imagined by producer Michael J. Shapiro for the 1996 edition of the gala, who spoke to the Wall Street Journal in 2022 about coming up with the idea to honor
“There were some people who said they cried when they looked at some of the images,” Shapiro said. “I love that I was able to touch somebody with images of people that we grew up with in darkened theaters.
He added, “I said, ‘It should be an affectionate goodbye to all of these people, and we should see them when they were at their very best.”
In addition to the In Memoriam segment of the Oscars telecast, a full gallery of those who have passed on since last year’s Oscars can be seen on the official site for The Academy here.
