Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, you’re both officially off the hook.
Accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has accepted full responsibility for Sunday’s unprecedented, embarrassing mixup that led La La Land to be erroneously named Best Picture instead of actual winner Moonlight.
“We sincerely apologize to Moonlight, La La Land, Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, and Oscar viewers for the error that was made during the award announcement for Best Picture,” the company said in a statement early Monday. “The presenters had mistakenly been given the wrong category envelope and when discovered, was immediately corrected. 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, ABC, and Jimmy Kimmel handled the situation.”
The colossal screw-up occurred after the category’s co-presenters, Beatty and Dunaway, were accidentally given the Best Actress envelope — which contained La La Land‘s Emma Stone’s winning card — by mistake (which explains the double-take Beatty did on stage upon opening said envelope).
“I’m sorry. There’s a mistake. Moonlight, you guys won Best Picture,” La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz announced to the stunned crowd, before flashing the correct card and inviting the Moonlight cast and producers onstage to accept their trophy. “This is not a joke. Moonlight has won Best Picture.”
Embarassing, but tweet worthy.
Marketing, please
Right. Stone said she had her card the whole time.
There’s more than one. Check out the screen grab that zooms in on the envelope Beatty is holding. It is clearly marked “Best Actress”.
For those who know their Oscar lore, now that we know for sure that PricewaterhouseCoopers keeps an extra envelope at the ready, maybe now Rex Reed will finally apologize to Marisa Tomei.
For everyone else, look it up.
Where have you been? We’ve known “for sure” for years. PwC has talked about their being two briefcases each filled with their own set of envelopes. The two idiots who flubbed up even did an interview with HuffPo about this back in January. Not new info except for the lay people.
*there
“Emmy Stone” Jesus do you guys not know how to edit/ peer review your damn work ?
EW is WAY, WAY worse.
EW literally much have no editors based on what I see. And their social media posts are worst of all. Whoever writes them didn’t graduate the sixth grade
“must have,” not “much”
Do you see how much material they crank out every day? They are always at the forefront of TV news. Things always get fixed eventually, but I’ll forgive them a few missteps, since the material they provide is always stellar.
EW is “always stellar”.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I was definitely referring to TVLine, not EW :)
And at 3:30 in the morning. The error has been fixed. (Thank you for the informed support, Kay.) –Mgmt.
EVERYONE makes typos, because no one is perfect! We all need to give our fellow humans a break!
I’m gonna freak out about that red “a”. Any minute now…
1. You’re rude.
2. Be grateful you can access this site for free, and forgive the occasional error with grace.
So Brian Cullinan (“Matt Damon lookalike”) and Martha Ruiz (“Latina”) of PwC – wonder who’ll be the subject of a Tweet?
Hope someone was standing by with wet wipes to get the egg off their faces. Mornings after are not being kind to the well dressed hypocrites are they? Kind of reminiscent of the November election. Live in your gated communities and protest the building of a wall. SMH
This was Warren’s fault. Mr Big Director !!!! Making old people look bad. HE should have stopped and said WRONG ENVRLOPE. THE WRONG cast should NEVER gotten to the stage.
I immediately blamed the senior stars for not being able to see without their specs and I am here to apologize for blaming them. I do feel that Warren should have spoken up sooner he did look more than a little confused. Old age is not for sissies. I know, I am 78 myself.
PWC erred in passing Beatty and Dunaway wrong envelope. HOWEVER, the old biddies should have pulled out their drugstore glasses, READ the envelope and then called for assistance before making the preventable colossal faux pas.
The Academy changed the appearance of the envelopes this year, from gold with big, black print, to red envelopes that are hard to read, no matter the age of the eyes. The PWC partner for the Southwest US handed Warren the wrong envelope before he and Faye went out. Faye is the one who said what was printed on the card (the movie that Emma Stone won for). Warren was looking at the card, looked into the envelope, looked at the front of it, looked over to the sidelines – clearly something wasn’t right. PWC is at fault, they are the ones who handle the envelopes at the Awards.
I don’t get it… if Emma Stone already got her envelope (and her Oscar), how Warren and Faye get another one?
There are always two envelopes, one kept on each side of the stage.
There are two sets of envelopes, one on each set of the stage, so they’re ready wherever the presenter will be entering from. There’s an accountant on each side to hand them to the presenter entering from that side. DiCaprio, who presented Best Actress, entered from one side and was given the Best Actress envelope that was there. Beatty and Dunaway entered from the other side, and instead of being given Best Picture, were handed the Best Actress envelope kept on that side. The accountant on that side of the stage screwed up.
Too slow. I should have left it to the experts!
The bigger news here is that the academy voters are totally off their rockers. The Best Picture award has to at least go to a movie that the public wants to see, if they’re going to have such a low quality bar for potential nominees. “Arrival” is a good case in point — a movie with a hodge-podge of scenes spliced together out of sequence with whale-like sound effects that, to the viewer, apparently depicts how the super-intelligent space travelers communicate — gets nominated. “Moonlight” could not be Best Picture under any criteria unless the sole criteria was to make up for perceived racial slights from past years. So it’s OK for the academy to stiff the best and most innovative movie to come along in forever because the voters had good intentions — “righting” a “wrong” they created by themselves in the first place. The “Moonlight” producers should hand over the Oscar to “La La Land” in recognition of the utter fact that it was the only good movie in a really bad year for movies.
You obviously never saw Moonlight or you wouldn’t have made such an ill-informed comment.
Guessing you haven’t seen Moonlight? Because without a doubt it deserved to win over Lala Land.
In it’s opening week, while only playing in 4 theaters, Moonlight made $400,000. The next week, in only 36 theaters, it made 900,000. That indicates that people did want to see the film. It is a low budget film that at its widest release was playing in fewer than 3000 theaters, so it was not going to make as much as a big budget wide release.
I was legit shocked when Lala Land was called out as the winner because i knew there were better deserving movies. If it was not Moonlight, it was going to be Manchester by the Sea…IMO La la Land was 3rd at best for Best Picture.
Lmao I’m guessing this ignorant comment stems from your not actually seeing “Moonlight” – this film was storytelling at its finest. Gorgeously portrayed and brilliantly weaved. La La Land was a fine movie, but in no way was it the best film of the year. I wouldn’t even place it in the top five from that category, to be honest.
Envelopegate? Really?
Does every scandal/mix-up in America have to have the “-gate” suffix added on? Yeah, I know, it’s a reference to the Watergate scandal from the Nixon admin. But it’s getting really tired and it makes headlines look awkward and unprofessional. Just use real words. “…envelope mix-up” looks and sounds much better.
https://twitter.com/hashtag/envelopegate
I watched. Quickly corrected but still a major mix-up!!
Publicity stunt.
who really cares!!!!!