One of my favorite parts of the Academy Awards is the salute to those in the film industry that have passed on in the last year. Tonight's show was a real disappointment! The film montage was very difficult to follow because the show's director cut in and out of the big screen TV's showing the montage of those that had died this past year. However the biggest shame was the silence of the audience when the screen showed Charlton Heston who died in April of 2008.You could hear a pin drop. Paul Newman got a big cheer as did most of the actors..... but not Charlton Heston who won a "Best Actor" Academy Award for "Ben Hur." I have heard there is a "black list" for conservatives in Hollywood but does it even apply to those that have died?
After he died I posted this on this blog:
When I was a young child growing up in Boise Idaho I went to see Cecil B DeMille's "The Greatest Show on Earth" about a traveling circus in which Heston was the circus boss. For days after the movie I couldn't get the movie out of my mind. I would dream at night that I was in the movie and be disappointed in the morning when I woke up that I was only dreaming. This was my first Charlton Heston movie and I can still see him issuing orders so that the "show would go on" in spite of the circus train wreck and other disasters. I can still see him as Ben Hur (1959) and El Cid (1961) in which he played the title characters. I will never forget him as the U.S. Marine Corps officer in "55 Days of Peking" (1963) where he protected the United State embassy and the "foreign compound" during the Boxer Rebellion or his portrayal of General "Chinese" Gordon in Khartoum (1966). "Midway" (1976) and "The Mountain Men" (1980) stand out among his later films. In the end I will always see him holding a rifle over his head at a NRA convention. As long as we go to movies he will live on in our imagination of what a heroic man should be.
I found this on Wikipedia tonight:
Richard Corliss wrote in Time magazine, "From start to finish, Heston was a grand, ornery anachronism, the sinewy symbol of a time when Hollywood took itself seriously, when heroes came from history books, not comic books. Epics like Ben-Hur or El Cid simply couldn't be made today, in part because popular culture has changed as much as political fashion. But mainly because there's no one remotely like Charlton Heston to infuse the form with his stature, fire and guts."
Shame on you Hollywood! The Silence was deafening.
