Columnist criticizes Oscars' Malone omission

Jeff Wells, who writes an on-line column on the movie industry called Hollywood Elsewhere correctly, in my opinion, took the Oscars’ producers to task today for their failure to include Academy Award winning actress Dorothy Malone in its "in-memoriam" segment (I must admit I don’t particularly care for Wells referring to this as "the death reel" — that gives me uncomfortable chills). Oscars’ only defense would be that Malone died this year — on Jan. 19 — but as Wells also points out Tom Paxton died last year before the Oscar telecast and he was not included in either this segment or last year’s.

Here, in part, is Wells’ rant on the issue;

"The decision by Oscar telecast producers Mike DeLuca and Suzanne Todd to omit Oscar-winner Dorothy Malone from the death reel was a stunner. Malone was iconic in the ’50s and ’60s — what were they thinking? Even if she hadn’t won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as a sexual compulsive in Douglas Sirk‘s Written on the Wind (’57), Malone’s book-store scene with Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (’46) would have more than sufficed.

"These plus her performances in Sirk’s The Tarnished Angels (’57), Andrew Stone‘s The Last Voyage, Robert Aldrich‘s The Last Sunset (’61) and her Constance MacKenzie character on ABC’s Peyton Place series from ’64 to ’69 … .c’mon.

"Why are some Hollywood luminaries included in the death reel and others ignored? The process seems haphazard and arbitrary.

"Deluca and Todd could have made up this year for excluding Bill Paxton (who passed on 2.25.17) in last year’s death reel, but naahhh.

"They also blew off Powers Boothe, Adam West, Glen Campbell, Robert Guillaume, David Cassidy, Fats Domino (although they included Chuck Berry), Hugh Hefner and Jim Nabors.

"They included Jeanne Moreau but without a dialogue clip or brief image montage. On both sides of the Atlantic Moreau was a thriving legend in the ’50s, ’60s and early ’70s. Orson Welles (yeah, I know … who?) once called her "the greatest actress in the world," and her sepia-toned image appeared for less than two effing seconds?"