The actress of Glee, drowned last July at the age of 33, was excluded from the editing of the traditional final sequence of tributes to deceased personalities.
Almost flawless. The 93rd Academy Awards, which crowned director Chloe Zhao for her film Nomadland and Anthony Hopkins for his role in The Father, shone with its sobriety. Three hours dedicated to the seventh art, punctuated by a few nugget moments, musical interludes and coronations in accordance with the new standards of the Academy in terms of diversity. It was without counting on the eternal sequence In Memoriam, which – as usual – unleashed criticism on social networks.
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After Luke Perry, the star of Beverly Hills 90210 died of a stroke in 2019, the “oblivion” of Naya Rivera this year caused a stir among fans. The actress, famous for her role as Santana Lopez in the series Glee, was found drowned in early July 2020 in Lake Piru in California, while swimming with her four-year-old son. The child, found asleep on the drifting boat that his mother had rented for the occasion, will tell investigators to have seen her “Disappear under the surface”. Apparently caught, both of them, in the particularly strong currents of this artificial body of water, the actress would have had the strength to save the child but not herself.
On Twitter, the outrage was at the rendezvous. “I’m sorry but Naya Rivera shouldn’t have been left out of the Oscars In Memoriam streak tonight. It’s a shame”, can we read on the social network. “Was it too much for the Oscars to put Naya Rivera in the tribute sequence?”
Finally, this absence from the editing led to a wave of improvised tributes, in order to do justice to the deceased. Disappeared at the age of thirty-three, Naya Rivera is the third headliner of the series to die before thirty-five, after Cory Monteith, died of drug and alcohol overdose in 2013 and the suicide of Mark Salling in 2018, while he was to be tried for possession of child pornography images.
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Absent from the Academy’s photo gallery
The Academy of Oscars did not react to the controversy, unlike 2019 when it justified in a statement the departure of Luke Perry: “The Academy receives hundreds of requests from people to include beloved members or their industry colleagues in the Oscar tribute sequence. An executive committee that represents each category draws up a list and makes a selection of the people who will be honored on television for a limited time. ” She had also indicated that the actor’s photo appeared in the institution’s online gallery. However, the actress was not entitled to her tribute card and does not appear, for the time being, still on the site.
Besides Rivera, the absences of the singer from Fountains of Wayne, Adam Schlesinger, nominated for the Oscars in 1997 in the Best Song category and died of Covid-19 in 2020, where actors Jessica Walter and Nick Cordero were noticed and did not fail to disappoint the faithful.
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Oscars 2021: Naya Rivera fans angry after the actress is forgotten in the In Memoriam sequence