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The Academy Awards celebrated movie heroes during Sunday’s Oscars, but one real-life hero was missing: Batkid.
Batkid, the alter ego of five-year-old Miles Scott, was invited by the Academy to participate in a segment during the telecast, a source confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter. Miles and his family traveled to Los Angeles, but the segment was canceled the day of the ceremony.
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The Oscars ceremony included montages of movie heroes from animated, documentary and feature films. Chris Evans, Jim Carrey and Sally Field introduced the segments. A planned appearance from The Amazing Spider-Man star Andrew Garfield didn’t materialize.
“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,” the Academy said in a statement on Thursday. “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.”
Sources say Miles rehearsed a segment with Garfield during during a Saturday run-through, but it was then decided that the segment wasn’t coming together as originally envisioned it and it was cut from the show — as was a second musical number that didn’t appear in the final broadcast. Insiders say it was part of the production process, which involved mounting segments before deciding if they would ultimately work within the show.
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“I don’t know if they ran out of time, or if there was something about the segment they didn’t like,” Natalie Scott, Miles’ mother, told the International Business Times. “It got pulled so quickly that we didn’t have a lot of insight into what was going on.”
Miles, who completed cancer treatments last summer, set the Internet ablaze in November, when he traveled around San Francisco fighting crime dressed as the Caped Crusader. The outing, which was thanks to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, earned Miles a shout-out from President Barack Obama and an appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America.
Borys Kit and Gregg Kilday contributed to this story.
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