Was thinking about the Oscar flub from 2 years ago (where Beatty and Dunaway announced that La La Land had won Best Picture because they’d been given a wrong envelope) and wondered if, in the heat of the moment, the people responsible for the mixup had decided to go with a cover-up and indeed squelch the facts and let “La La Land” be awarded the Oscar.
How many people were truly in the know that Moonlight had won, instead of La La Land? Could they just “let” La La Land be the winner, on the spot, and shred the envelopes?
I don’t think it could’ve been covered up without Warren Beatty’s immediate… as in, right then and there, acting like nothing was wrong… his immediate complicity.
Without that, all else fails. And even then, he would eventually babble.
Supposedly with the Academy Awards, only the two or three accountants know the names of the winners, unlike some of the other award shows. (I remember watching a live broadcast of another award show a few years ago and the official Twitter account was tweeting the winners’ names about thirty seconds before the envelopes were actually opened.)
(That wasn’t Twitter… that was your DVR being 35 seconds behind real time. )
Seriously, though, it really rests with Beatty as he was the person on the spot when the mistake occurred. When he showed it to Dunaway, she, too, would then need to keep quiet.
Then someone would have to make the cards disappear - the incorrect one in Beatty’s hand, as well as the correct one (actually, IIRC, two cards) which were still in the hands of the PWC guys.
I just think it would’ve been hard to pull off, unless the fix was in at the beginning.
But what would he babble? He had the wrong card, but he didn’t see the right card. Iif the Academy stated “he was handed a card showing information for the wrong category that caused his pause on stage, but he DID announce the correct winner” then it just becomes a minor goof (less memorable than “Adele Dazeem”) rather than possibly the biggest screw-up in the history of the show.
I don’t think a cover-up could have worked, simply because I don’t think there’s anybody in a position to push the “go ahead and cover this up” button. The info would almost certainly leak, but I don’t think Beatty and Dunaway would be the weak link of that chain.
Well, it was the biggest screwup in the history of the show, no “possibly” about it.
But Beatty saying he read the B Actress card, then the Academy saying “it’s all good, no big deal”… well, this award is worth millions - I’m pretty sure somebody will demand to have this proven to them.
Of course, given LLL was the expected winner, it may have been possible to brush this under the rug. But, as with Marisa Tormei, the whispers would exist for a generation.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers would have owned up to it. Their business is based on accuracy, and naming La La Land and letting it stand would have been terrible PR for them. And eventually, someone would have spilled the beans.
When Steve Harvey announced the wrong winner at the Miss Universe pageant, it took two minutes for him to come back and announce he was wrong. From this I gather that The Powers That Be would have, at best, 90 seconds to realize their mistake, huddle, decide to keep it hushed up, tell everyone, especially the accountants, to keep their mouths shut, and end the show. I don’t think you could come to a group decision to cover it up that fast and make it stick.
It could work if there was an understood policy that, in the event of an incorrect announcement, the announcement stands. That seems like a weird policy, though, and if rumors of that policy got out, it would probably cause a lot of raised eyebrows.
It would also invalidate the entire awards show, because announcers could just pick their favourite candidate while the arrangers are rending their garments backstage. So, probably not a very good policy.
Warren Beatty knew something was up because he had the card for the wrong category. He showed the card to Faye Dunaway, who seems not to have looked at it very closely when she took the card and read “La La Land.” If Beatty clued her in while she was on stage, she would have taken a closer look at it and realized she had the wrong card and, possibly, the wrong film.
Two audit partners from Price Waterhouse Coopers knew that Faye Dunaway announced the wrong name. Their sole job is to make sure that the Oscars go to the people who won them. They would be staking their entire professional reputation, and that of their firm, on being able to maintain a conspiracy for no benefit to them. This doesn’t seem like a risk worth taking for them. I think the PWC partners are also on opposite sides of the stage, so they would have to conclude, without any coordination, that they are best off keeping this secret than revealing it immediately. This is a variation on the prisoner’s dilemma, where neither party can cooperate and they are each individually better off if they reveal the truth. However, in this case, unlike in a prisoner’s dilemma, they are both better off if they both reveal the truth.
The cards with the right winners still existed. (I believe there are cards on each side of the stage to allow presenters to come from either side with the correct card.) Someone made the correct cards that said “Moonlight,” so that person also knew who won. Do the audit partners make the cards? I doubt it, so you have to ensure the loyalty of the card maker (probably one of their secretaries or a financial printer). Who else may have had access to the correct cards after the winner was announced? I’ll bet people usually look at them or even keep them as souvenirs after the broadcast, so whoever saw the correct cards would know the truth. Now you have to bring them into the conspiracy too.
If I were the auditor, I’m pretty sure I would have blurted out a choice word or two when the wrong name was read out. Who was around to hear that reaction and realize what happened? Now you have more necessary conspirators.
I’ll bet the ballots all still existed and records of the ballot counting and the totals still existed. (I know a little about audit practices and my hunch is that the audit partners responsible for tallying the votes would have already prepared an audit report that was to be submitted to the firm, and perhaps to the client, after the broadcast). So the auditors would have to go back and destroy all that evidence too, without drawing any attention to why they were destroying it. Then, depending on the audit practices of the firm, they might even have to make fake ballots and records to cover the mistake. All this expands the conspiracy further, especially if custody of the ballots and/or the report went to someone other than the audit partners onstage before the broadcast.
There is a mathematical theorem that the larger the number of conspirators, the greater the chance that the conspiracy will be revealed, whether intentionally or accidentally. Maths study shows conspiracies 'prone to unravelling' - BBC News That theorem relies on all the conspirators wanting to keep the secret. I sincerely doubt that by coincidence, they all really wanted La La Land to win and didn’t care at all about fairness to Moonlight. In this case, nothing aligns the incentives of all the necessary conspirators.
This conspiracy grew too big within seconds to keep the secret for long. As soon as Beatty got off stage, reporters would have been asking about his reaction. I doubt anyone who knew wanted to keep this secret. Even if they did, there was no time for them to coordinate.
Beatty would know. He was obviously confused by what was written on the card he had received. When he showed the card to Dunaway, she simply read the name on the card without reading which category the card was for. Oops. Martha Ruiz and Brian Cullinan, CPAs at PwC in Los Angeles, would also know who had actually won for Best Picture. Had there been a cover-up, AND if anyone ever talk about the screw up, PwC would have been finished as an accounting firm. Who would ever trust them to do their books if they were capable of such a cover-up? Beatty’s reputation would also have been trashed, and he would probably be shunned in Hollyweird.
Given a little more time to think about had happened, Beatty, I assume, would have exchanged the wrong card for the correct envelope. Given his movie-actor training, perhaps he was waiting on his mark for someone to bring him the correct script?
Secrecy is paramount. Team members from PwC meet at an undisclosed location, and each accountant tabulates only a portion of the votes so he or she won’t know the final results. Only Ruiz and Cullinan put everything together in the end to determine who the Oscar winners are, and they commit those results to memory. The winners’ names are not typed into a computer or written down, to avoid potential lost slips of paper or breaches of security.
As for the printer “knowing”, it’s probably a very marginal cost for PWC to print 2 winner cards for ALL nominees, then have PWC select the 2 correct cards out of the printed selections. That way you have secrecy from the printer.
The winners’ names are not typed into a computer or written down, to avoid potential lost slips of paper or breaches of security.
It doesn’t sound as if PwC would not trust the preparation of the cards, or envelopes, to any outside agency, including a printing firm. There aren’t that many categories. All printing could be done in-house at PwC.
And, based on doorhinge’s cite, you are both correct that they print out a full set of ballots for all the winners. The audit partners’ bring only the correct cards with them, in a locked briefcase, to the ceremony. So we’ve eliminated one conspirator.
We’ve introduced some new ones though. There are a team of accountants who each do a portion of the tabulation so no one accountant has the total count. Again, based on my experience with audit practices, I expect each accountant signs audit workpapers attesting to their subtotal. If you need to get the audit firms’ vote totals to match the incorrect result, someone has to go back and forge those workpapers accordingly. Nowadays, the workpapers may be signed electronically with encrypted signatures, potentially making them much harder to forge. No idea if that’s actually what PWC does for the Oscar ballots.
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