The Internet Is Going Full ‘CSI’ To Find Out How The Oscars SNAFU Happened

We should have seen this coming. 
We needed to recognise the slow ramp-up of awards shows mishaps. We got it twisted with the Australia’s Next Top Model thing, and we still didn’t see the pattern after Steve Harvey’s Miss Universe flub.  

Shoulda, woulda, coulda. And now, we find the most crucial moment of the biggest night in entertainment was hijacked by another mistakenly-read card.

Here’s the footage of Warren Beatty calling out La La Land over Moonlight for Best Picture. We know you’ve seen it by now, but goddamn, it bears rewatching to determine exactly how this FUBAR situation came to pass:

 
  
Beatty said “I opened the envelope, and it said ‘Emma Stone, La La Land.’ That’s why I took such a long look at Faye [Dunaway], and at you. I wasn’t trying to be funny.” He backed up that claim in a post-awards interview, too.

Still, Stone seemed to shoot that claim down in some post-Oscars interviews.

The thing is, the Oscars organisers actually have two identical cards backstage, meaning each presenter should have gotten one. In a statement, PricewaterhouseCoopers – the accounting form in charge of keeping track of the votes, and of the cards – said they’re “currently investigating how this could have happened, and deeply regret that this occurred.”


Some CSI-level image enhancing from one Aaron Vallely of the Huffington Post revealed that yeah, Beatty must have been handed the duplicate card, ’cause he certainly wasn’t given the one corresponding to Best Picture.

Jeffrey Fleishman of the Los Angeles Times reportedly caught a decidedly terrified outburst about the incident from someone backstage. We can only imagine, tbh.

We may never find out if some poor production staffer handed Beatty the wrong card – and look, if that was the case, they’ve probably been put in the entertainment industry gulag by now – but you can bet internet entertainment sleuths will try to get to the bottom of it.

One Twitter user did have a theory for how the spare ended up in his hands, and it involves the focal point of last year’s most exciting Oscars moment.

Regardless of whether or not Leo fucked up the ceremony, a rightful winner emerged from the carnage. Moonlight will go down in history for three reasons: being an excellent and poignant investigation of LGBT and black identities, actually winning Best Picture, and for being mashed into in one of the most entertaining fuck-ups in awards show history.


Source: Variety. 
Photo: Barry Jenkins / Twitter.

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