Oscars In Memoriam: Shannen Doherty, Michelle Trachtenberg And Linda Lavin Among Notable Snubs

Riddle us this: Is an Oscar telecast a real Oscar telecast if there isn't Sunday night quarterbacking over who was omitted from the annual In Memoriam segment?

The traditional five-minute interlude — which arrived during the latter half of Sunday's ABC telecast — honored dozens of film giants that we lost in the last 12 months, including Dabney Coleman, Shelley Duvall, Louis Gossett Jr., James Earl Jones, Joan Plowright, Gena Rowlands and Maggie Smith.

Two-time Oscar winner Gene Hackman, who last week was found dead at the home he shared with his also-deceased wife, classical pianist Betsy Arakawa in New Mexico, received a special tribute from Hackman's Unforgiven co-star Morgan Freeman. Legendary music composer Quincy Jones, meanwhile, also received a special commemoration, from Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey.

However, there were a number of notable big screen names missing from the In Memoriam montage. Among them: John Ashton, Michael Cole, Shannen Doherty, Linda Lavin, Martin Mull, Nicholas Pryor, Morgan Spurlock, Lynne Marie Stewart, Tony Todd, Michelle Trachtenberg and Gwen Van Dam.

"It's an Oscar ritual that always has a rustle of drama beneath the surface," Academy Awards authority Michael Schulman recently told our sister pub The Hollywood Reporter of the In Memoriam segment, which is curated by by a committee representing all 19 Academy branches and not the ABC telecast's producers. "No matter what happens, there will be 10 headlines about who was snubbed posthumously, and there's nothing that can be done about it."