Culture

We’ve Pieced Together How The Horrifying Oscars Catastrophe Happened

It was Leonardo DiCaprio's fault, kinda.

by Osman Faruqi  27 February 2017

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Today’s Oscars featured the single most horrifying moment in the award’s 89 year history (even including John Travolta horribly mispronouncing Idina Menzel’s name).

Hollywood icons Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty were given the momentous, yet incredibly basic, task of reading out some words on a piece of paper and announcing the winner of the Best Picture category.

Somehow, they fucked it up.

Dunaway announced the winner as La La Land, an enormous contingent of the film’s crew and cast came on stage to accept the award, and speeches started being given. Then something excruciating happened. A producer ran on stage to inform the ‘winners’ that there had been a mistake and the real winner was underdog contender Moonlight.

Everyone lost their minds, the La La Land team graciously handed over their illegitimately obtained awards, the Moonlight team celebrated and eventually things settled down.

But how did it happen?

An Investigation

To understand how Dunaway and Beatty got it so, so wrong we have to rewind a little bit. The voting and award administration of the Oscars is run by accountancy firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC).

Only two PWC partners know the identity of Oscars winners before the ceremony: Brian Cullinan and Martha Ruiz.

Both Cullinan and Ruiz carry a briefcase containing a copy of the envelopes for each award. They are escorted by security everywhere they go. The important thing to note here is that there are two sets of envelopes for each award.

Now let’s skip back to the part of the ceremony where Dunaway and Beatty incorrectly announce La La Land as the winner.

Listen carefully to clip:

Towards the end you can hear Beatty say “It says ‘Emma Stone'” before Dunaway exclaims “What?!”.

Later, during the onstage clusterfuck, Beatty told the audience the contents of the envelope actually read “Emma Stone, La La Land”, which is why he looked confused.

The only envelope to contain the words “Emma Stone, La La Land” was the one for Best Actress, awarded to Emma Stone immediately prior to the Best Picture award by none other than one-time Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio.

You can see him holding onto the envelope after announcing Stone as the winner here:

Okay, so the theory is that Leo either deliberately or accidentally left the envelope lying around which Warren Beatty, for some reason, picked up and took on stage instead of the correct envelope for Best Picture.

This theory is believable because Leo has a revenge motive. After all, he has lost at the Oscars five times and won only once. Also, he’s really angry about climate change so what better way to get back at the US elites responsible for it than by messing with the Oscars, right?  But there’s a twist.

According to Emma Stone, she had her Best Actress envelope and card the whole time. So either she’s lying for some reason, or Leo did give the envelope, or she took the second envelope from the other PwC partner and we’re back to the original theory about Leo planting the envelope to trap Warren Beatty.

One backstage source told USA Today that one of the PwC partners saw Beatty take the wrong envelope and ran on stage to try and stop him. If that’s true, it sounds like Beatty just fucked up, rather than some kind of dastardly Leo plot.

During the whole onstage screwup, this man appears out of nowhere standing next to Emma Stone:

Screen Shot 2017-02-27 at 5.34.47 PM

Here he is again, on the right:

Screen Shot 2017-02-27 at 5.37.04 PM

Look familiar? That’s none other than Brian Cullinan, one of the PwC partners with access to the envelopes.

Relax dude, you’re an accountant not James Bond.

And here’s Brian on stage holding an envelope:

Screen Shot 2017-02-27 at 5.38.18 PM

So that’s Brian Cullinan with the correct envelope, trying to sort out the whole mess. Looks like Leo is exonerated (for now) and the whole thing is Beatty’s fault for picking up the wrong envelope. But also, like, shouldn’t the Oscars do a thing where they check it’s the right envelope? Rather than just hoping that the hosts who grab one of many identical red envelopes take the right one?

It really feels like they should have a better process in place, rather than relying on an accountant and the guy from Bonny and Clyde. 

Then again, maybe the whole thing was staged for ratings and hype. After all, M. Night Shyamalan has already taken credit:

At least the good guys won.