I don’t even have to see the Oscars’ cut Batkid segment to know that I would’ve preferred for it to be included. It could have been twenty solid minutes of Batkid and Ellen DeGeneres standing awkwardly next to each other, and it still would’ve been adorable and better than any other part of the Oscars. So why did it get cut? The Internet has some theories.
The Academy released a statement about the cut segment yesterday, which was also supposed to feature five year-old Miles “Batkid” Scott alongside Amazing Spider-Man actor Andrew Garfield, saying:
Due to the nature of a live show, hard decisions sometimes must be made which require the Academy to cut segments due to the logistics of production. Andrew Garfield understood that his segment had to be omitted, and he drove to Disneyland on Monday to spend time with 5-year-old Miles Scott (Batkid) and his family.
Naturally, people have assumed that this is just good PR and that the segment was cut for other reasons, because how could you cut the world’s most adorable 5 year-old Batman from your show just on a whim? The going theory is that Andrew Garfield threw some kind of hissy fit about his lines during the segment, but out of all the actors in the world that I could imagine robbing a child of his chance to appear at the Oscars, Andrew Garfield doesn’t make the list.
Vanity Fair received a statement from Garfield’s representatives, which reads:
In full collaboration with the Academy and the show writer, Andrew prepared a segment for the Oscars to honor Miles Scott as the true hero that he is. As some point overnight on Saturday / Sunday morning, it was decided by those running the show that the segment didn’t work in the ceremony. They decided to pull it – Andrew and Miles were equally upset. The producers arranged for Miles and his family to visit Disneyland on Monday and Andrew drove down to visit them and to bring Miles a personal gift.
Andrew did the right thing for Batkid and anyone saying otherwise is flat out lying.
Batkid’s mom, Natalie Scott, said that the reasons that the segment was eventually cut were unclear, and that it was an extremely sudden decision. “I don’t know if they ran out of time, or if there was something about the segment they didn’t like,” she said to the International Business Times. “It got pulled so quickly that we didn’t have a lot of insight into what was going on.”
According to Mashable, only the montage of movie heroes, which was introduced by Captain America‘s Chris Evans instead of Garfield, survived the cut. The rest of the bit was supposed to go on with Batkid being made an honorary hero and a Gotham City set bearing the “Batkid” named, which Mashable has a behind-the-scenes image of, and they even did a rehearsal the day before.
As our sister site, The Mary Sue, pointed out, it would have been super easy for the Academy to just swap Evans into Garfield’s role entirely, so it’s pretty unlikely that they scrapped a whole, adorable bit just because an actor was being a jerk. It’s a lot more likely that the bit just got cut for time or other lame reasons that I wish they’d just overlooked, especially when you consider that a second musical number was also cut. It’s not like this was the only thing that got dropped from the event, and the whole show still wound up pretty long.
It’s also pretty fair to note that Batkid is five years old, everyone. Being on stage at the Oscars in a scripted segment is a lot for someone that age to handle, and he’s been through a lot in his life. (Remember, the whole Batkid thing started as a Make-A-Wish event, because he’s recovering from cancer treatment.)
In the official Batkid video that Make-A-Wish recently put out, his adult Batman companion talked about how tired Miles got in the middle of the day when they were saving San Francisco, and they thought he might not make it through the entire day they had planned. If the whole Oscars thing was all too much for the little guy, that would be a pretty rational reason to cut it, and it might have been better for him in the long run if that was the case.
Maybe Miles just needs to be Miles for a bit, everybody.
Don’t worry about Batkid, though. We might not have been graced with his massive cuteness, but he got to go to Disneyland on the Academy’s dime, so he probably wasn’t too disappointed. If he somehow did get cut from the show due to Garfield, that guy must have a great PR person, because it’s been reported that he was hanging out with Miles and family at Disneyland, which would’ve been pretty awkward if he got their son booted from the Oscars.
(via The Mary Sue, image via Make-A-Wish)
- The Official Batkid video is really great, too
- He got his own billboard to keep criminals at bay
- Here’s how he originally saved San Francisco
