Seems like having two couriers with envelopes is a recipe for disaster. They should have one courier be the primary and the other be the backup. The envelopes would never be taken from the backup’s satchel, only the primary’s, barring extreme emergency (i.e., primary suddenly goes violently ill, etc)
I would describe it a little more charitably than that. He’s struggling to figure out what to say, the heat is on, he’s dragging it out by repeating “Best Picture…” etc., and she is assuming he is teasing and tantalizing everyone, saying “you’re awful” or something like that. So he shows it to her, like “okay, Ms. Impatient, what do *you *think this means?”. He didn’t make her just blurt out “La La Land”.
The reason for having two is so one can be on each side of the stage. Presenters can enter from either side, so they get handed an envelope by the courier on whichever side they’re starting from.
Yep, and they need to coordinate their envelopes carefully. PwC is wiping the egg off their faces.
I feel bad for Ms. Arquette and her loss, and of course she would have want her sister memorialized, but the number of people who die every year who worked in the movie business at some point has to be AT LEAST a thousand. It’s a large industry, after all, that’s been around longer than most people live.
The Oscar tribute to people who’ve died can;t show them all, it has to be at least somewhat choosy, and Alexis Arquette was near-unknown and wasn’t one of the 100 most important people in film to die in 2016 - I mean, she was in more movies than most people, but you’ve got to pick a certain number of people and she doesn’t make the cut by any rational analysis.
The guy who handed the wrong envelope to Beatty was Brian Cullinan, a PWC accountant.
I think this is the classic photoof the whole fiasco with Cullinan, Beatty and Headphone Guy (who is he?) all holding the envelope.
We still haven’t been told why it took them so long to correct the mistake and then with so much confusion. Yes, I am looking at you Headphone Guy !
And my understanding is that as soon as one envelope is given to the presenter, the other is immediately destroyed so that both sets are always running parallel and in synch.
But with the ceremony almost over, this protocol lapsed because one side was distracted (photo, social media, etc.) and that’s all it took to throw things off the rails.
Ah, I see.
Yes, the guy was tweeting a photo of Emma Stone. Buh-bye!
And I’m surprised this hasn’t happened before, for however long there have been identical sets of envelopes backstage. Do we know how many years there’ve been identical envelopes? ETA: I’m sure that PWC guy (Brian Cullinan) isn’t the first to be star struck there.
Oh, here’s why.
Trump blames Oscar blunder on Hollywood elites who were ‘focused so hard on politics’.
How on earth did we miss this reason?
Yeah, but he may have been first to have been well-paid to do ONE THING (make sure the envelopes are given out correctly), and to have failed to do that one thing.
It’s clear from the video what Warren Beatty’s thought-process was: he never looked at the front of the envelope. From this it is clear that he assumed that he did have the Best Picture envelope, and that whoever put the cards in the envelopes had mistakenly grabbed the “La La Land (Best Actress)” card in place of the “La La Land (Best Picture)” card.
In other words, Beatty knew that there had been a mistake—but he believed the mistake had to do with the category, rather than with the movie.
And then Faye Dunaway is given the card, and is scanning it looking for the name of a picture (since she knows she’s doing Best Picture) and reads what she finds that fits that criteria.
Yes.
If we must assume that future Price Waterhouse employees will similarly be busy tweeting and whatnot, making mistaken hand-outs of envelopes a continuing likelihood, then at the very least they should re-do the design of the cards to STRONGLY emphasize the category. Instead of having ‘Best Picture’ in tiny font at the bottom of the card, it should be in huge font, front and center (as in “BEST PICTURE: Moonlight” or such).
I maintain that Beatty, in showing the card to Dunaway, did so not to hang her out to dry.
I think it was more of a ‘look what the card says, what the hell?’
mmm
I can’t believe anyone could see it different. It’s how I saw it. He was not playing, he was flustered completely. He looked(very clearly) off stage. He showed her because he was like, “What…does it say Emma Stone?” She read the only movie name there was.
I see both of them 100% innocent.
Just want to post these tidbits for posterity. Would have posted them immediately after the show, but didn’t for obvious reasons.
Did anyone notice…
– When Katherine Johnson and the Hidden Figures cast were leaving the stage, Janelle Monae’s skirt got caught under Johnson’s chair wheel for a second?
(Also, did anyone notice that that was, hands down, the best gown of the night? It was beyond fashion; that was art.)
– When Auli’i Cravalho was singing the Moana song with the flag dancers doing their thing behind her, one of the flags bopped her in the head and she didn’t miss a beat?
– The Rolex commercial early on, with all the movie clips of people wearing Rolexes, that included a clip of Bill Paxton in Titanic? Too late, I’ve discovered how to tell Bill Paxton from Bill Pullman: Paxton was the one with the voice. 
This trend has been noticed.
Does anyone know if this is true?
If I was asked to guess, I’d have guessed that some longtime salaried employees are offered the honor of working the Academy Awards ceremony, that there’s no bonus in pay just the perks of getting a nice hotel room, expense account, fancy parties.
Not that I doubt that they are well-paid, I just wouldn’t have assumed they’re paid anything on top of their regular salary.
Apparently both of them are partners in the firm. If it’s anything like being a partner at a law firm, it means they get paid (in the words of Patton Oswald) not just an *obscene *amount of money, but a sacrilegious amount.
*Moonlight, La-La Land, Hacksaw Ridge, *etc. were “A” movies in terms of cinematography skill, etc… But there can only be one winner, and so if one movie pushes the social-issue, political-issue buttons that the Academy Award panelists/jury care about harder than the others, then it is likely to get that little extra boost to put it over the top, going from “A” to “A+” in the selection process.