That ‘Moonlight’ vs. ‘La La Land’ Oscars Best Picture Flub: What Happened?
How did the biggest award the 2017 Oscars had to offer — Best Picture — amount to an unprecedented flub that mistakenly named La La Land the winner over Moonlight at last night's (February 26) show? Backstage reports say it was sincerely an honest mistake.
According to Vanity Fair, Oscars producers stationed backstage immediately knew Faye Dunaway had made a mistake when she announced Damien Chazelle's musical film as the Best Picture winner. Evidently, two cards are created for each category for security purposes, and somehow, Dunaway and Warren Beatty ended up with a carbon copy of the award that named Emma Stone the ceremony's Best Actress. This would explain the snafu in spite of Stone's insistence that she still had her winning card when the mistake happened.
Pricewaterhouse Coopers, the accounting firm responsible for the presentation of Oscars, sent out an apology three hours after the show that aimed to mitigate the chaos:
"The presenters had mistakenly been given the wrong category envelope and when discovered, was immediately corrected," it read. "We are currently investigating how this could have happened, and deeply regret that this occurred. We appreciate the grace with which the nominees, the Academy, and Jimmy Kimmel handled the situation."
Moonlight director Barry Jenkins said Beatty insisted on trying to correct his error once the rightful winner's card — which named Moonlight — eventually manifested.
"Warren refused to show the card to anybody before he showed it to me," Jenkins said. "And so he did. He came upstairs and he walked over to me, and he showed the card. And everybody was asking, ‘Can I see the card’? And he’s like, ‘no, Barry Jenkins has to see the card, I need him to know.’ And he showed it to me. I felt better about what happened."
Still, Beatty, himself, doesn't really know exactly what went down.
"I looked down at the card and thought, this is very strange, because it says best actress. Maybe there was a misprint. I don't know what happened. And that's all I have I have to say on the subject," he told the Los Angeles Times.
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