Remembering Anita Page Despite Oscar Forgetting Her

1933 BAT World Famous Cinema Artistes

Thanks to @MaterialGirl850 on Twitter for pointing this out because I didn't notice, but during the In Memoriam section of Sunday night's Academy Awards, they somehow left Anita Page off the list.

Anita Page passed away last September 8 at the age of 98. Really more of a pre-code star, Page was widely referred to as the last of the surviving Silent Film stars before her 2008 passing. She was never nominated by the Academy herself, but does have a star on the Walk of Fame and did star in Oscar's second ever Best Picture winner, The Broadway Melody (1929), which took the big award in 1930 and had two other nominations.

I did a brief remembrance of Page on my Warren William blog last year and there's a full profile of her by Tammy Stone on my things-and-other-stuff.com site. Below you'll find a bunch of collectible images featuring Anita Page.

Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily does a good job of going over some of the Academy's other omissions (Patrick McGoohan. Eartha Kitt? C'mon!), but I just want to comment here on the overall, well, lameness of the always anticipated tribute portion of the show. Not to sound ghoulish, but it's always my favorite part of Oscars night because it's really the final time in the public eye for a lot of these important movie makers and entertainers. I mean we'll surely run into Paul Newman again, but we might have to hunt down Cyd Charisse and keep strange circles to recall Vampira at all, so I've always kept my mouth shut and soaked in this portion of the program.

Too bad Queen Latifah couldn't do the same.

The focus was taken away from where it should have been here, with the images blurring by and being positioned at odd angles, with the live performance taking prominence over the people we were supposed to be paying tribute to. All I can say is thank goodness for TCM, who at New Year's ran an excellent and complete Memorial reel of all those who'd left us throughout 2008. The Academy could take a lesson from their clip.

Enough rant, here are some pictures: