We Finally Know The Culprit Behind Yesterday’s Historic Oscars Balls Up

Well, after endless speculation on the colossal stitch up which saw La La Land handed the Academy Award for Best Picture intended for Moonlight, we’ve finally got an insight into what the fuck happened and how.

The New York Times has published a fairly exhaustive blow-by-blow of what happened on the stage, an event which led to the comprehensive humiliation of the La La Land crew – who, based on the extensive coverage, were no doubt expecting to be handed the award before weathering a storm of angry thinkpieces and tweets.

I’m holding the envelope and the award, and I had just given my speech, and there are people on the stage with headsets, and I thought, ‘That doesn’t seem right.’ They asked to see my envelope, which I haven’t opened. Clearly something was wrong. They open my envelope, and it says ‘Emma Stone, “La La Land.”’ So clearly something is not right. The guys in headsets were going around with urgency looking for the other envelope — it just kind of appeared. One of the guys opens it, and it says ‘Moonlight,’ and I took it onstage and went to the microphone and said what I said.

Accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, who count Oscars votes and provide the famous envelopes, apologised for their role in the screwup in a brief statement, but it wasn’t entirely clear what exactly had gone wrong:

I read the card that was in the envelope. I thought, ‘This is very strange because it says “best actress” on the card.’ And I felt that maybe there was some sort of misprint […] That’s all I have to say on the subject.

This is extremely unlikely to silence the conspiracy theorists who reckon it was all put on by the Academy, but there are two things I would say make that angle somewhat unlikely. Either Horowitz and the rest of the La LA Land producers were told about the stitch up beforehand – which means they would have agreed to be ritually humiliated onstage in front of the entire world – or the Academy were willing to throw them (and PwC) under the bus for buzz.