I appear to be in the minority who don’t blame Beatty or Dunaway at all. I think my face and reaction would be about the same. You just figure they know what they are doing when you send you up there.
His reaction is priceless. I don’t blame him for kind of showing her what it says. It must have been super weird.
So weird. I feel really bad for the presenters and the La La Land people.
The La La people were extremely kind and gracious. Just really the best way to handle it.
Dude, lets face it. Moonlight won because of the fact it ticked all of the Academy’s boxes for Very Important Social Message Film. It was not even the best “black” film nominated; that would be *Hidden Figures *(ok, I am biased, being a Space Geek). I fully suspect in a few years its going to be like Beautiful Mind and Driving Miss Daisy; people are goung to wonder; how in the ever loving fuck did it win.
Might have missed it earlier in the thread, but was David Bowie left off the In Memoriam segment? I don’t recall seeing his name/picture.
And Hidden Figures was a by-the-numbers Hollywood feel-good movie. Moonlight won because it was a very good movie. That you disagree doesn’t mean otherwise.
He was included in last year’s In Memoriam.
Of course they will. The controversy was because there was no Black nominees. That’s 20 people. Not the four winners.
I also would have loved to read Ebert’s review of the show. He loved the Oscars and this was surely a memorable one.
Hidden Figures is a nice movie. It’s very trite and cliched, but it’s fun, funny, and hopeful. It was the most fun of the 6 nominees I saw, but it was the worst of them as well.
Moonlight is a complex, powerful, and incredibly moving exploration of ostracism, sexuality, and love.
For me, the difference in quality between the two films is huge.
I have no problem with Moonlight winning, I saw 7 of the 9 Best Picture noms and thought that either Moonlight or Manchester by the Sea were the two best that I saw.
My only complaint would be that Moonlight didn’t win for Best Score.
Remarkable music!
I didn’t sort through the whole thread looking for this answer, so forgive me if it’s been noted:
With 3 awards for Moonlight…what’s the record for fewest awards for the Best Picture winner?
Some observations:
This was pretty much the award-show version of the ending of the Beatty/Dunnaway movie made 50 years ago which is the reason they were presenting in the first place.
I am guessing the Oscar organizers fancy themselves the pinnacle of the awards show business and perhaps had a good laugh at the Miss Universe fiasco which makes this one all the more embarrassing.
I am still not sure exactly what happened. There was a Reddit thread I was reading which had an elaborate explanation involving multiple envelopes and multiple mix-ups but I couldn’t quite understand it. The whole thing is ripe for an Oliver Stone/JFK style parody.
GRAND HOTEL, with Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford and various Barrymores, took home a Best Picture win and didn’t even get nominated for anything else.
According to this, Moonlight got as many Oscars as previous winners like Rocky, 12 years a slave, Casablanca and others:
But there are Best Picture winners with fewer Oscars than that:
Captain William Bligh: “Mr. Christian!!!”
Quickly getting back to this,
He was not in the montage. Yes, too recent. When Jennifer Aniston mentioned him in her intro, she had to choke back tears.
I thought Jimmy Kimmel did a good job. One standout line, “It has been an amazing year for movies. Black people saved NASA and white people saved jazz. That’s what you call progress.”
Actually, it’s pretty easy to explain. No conspiracy at all (i.e. Stone)
As has been noted on this thread and elsewhere on the net, PW has two agents with duplicate sets of envelopes. As a checks & balance. The agent was supposed to hand Beatty/Dunaway his Best Picture envelope but by mistake handed his Best Actress envelope (the other agent had handed his BA envelope to Leo). That’s it. A mistake.
The only question I and others should have is, why did it take so long for the mistake to be rectified. As the La La Land group began to take the stage the procedures should have been stopped immediately, long before the thank you speeches were given.
I didn’t end up seeing Manchester by the Sea. My husband had to leave town and we ran out of time in our grand plan. But I’ve heard good things.
My guess: next year, once both sets of envelopes safely arrive at the venue, one set is destroyed immediately. Envelopes get color coded. Name of category is more prominently printed on the outside.
I would say that the delay in rectifying the situation was reasonable…several seconds for the PWC guys to say “Wait…what??” then more time for them to sound the alarm and notify producers backstage. Several more for them to huddle and decide what do to about it. Several more to execute.
Wow, short memory on my part. It’s happened 3 times in the last 5 years.
Holy crap, The Godfather? Widely acknowledge as one of the top 5 films of all time…3 measly Oscars??
As to why it took so long to be rectified, PWC didn’t anticipate a mistake being made, so they didn’t have a procedure in place. They were caught flat-footed.
I wish I could find someone to give me the honest scoop on whether I really need to see the movie Moonlight as much as all the critics insist I do, with comments about how it will still be a landmark of cinema 20 years from now, and so on. I just have this strong suspicion that the OTT raves are all about the Message that it promotes rather than its cinematic qualities. And I’ve already gotten the memo that gay people deserve equal rights and racism is bad, mmkay? What I’m interested in is movies that are critically acclaimed because of their inherent cinematic merits.
Being an activism/message oriented movie is not always at cross purposes with being a great work of cinematic art, of course. Do the Right Thing comes to mind, but then that’s the only example I can think of, so…
Here is Sammy Davis Jr. calling the wrong name 50 years ago.
“Wait until the NAACP hears about this!”
An excellent recovery.
For me, “Moonlight” is not a message picture at all. It’s just a wonderful character study that, for me, packs a huge emotional wallop.
I don’t know if it will be a landmark of cinema. I just know that I left it feeling powerfully engaged with the characters. They are incredibly real characters, with everything that means.