I assume by “agent”, you mean “accountant”. And it doesn’t matter if the accountant’s boss was nearby; both he and she was the ones in charge of this account and understood the procedure. We’ve heard about this at least as far back as the year Marisa Tomei won.
It’s an hour long(!). TL;DL
Yes, accountant, thanks. And this assumes there is a procedure. There certainly should be. It’s easy to be a MMQB, and yes of course PWC screwed up.
No, being a Monday morning quarterback would be opining on what Beatty and Dunaway should have done. We know in hindsight what they should have done but as I pointed out, they have at least some excuse because La La Land was so widely expected to win anyway that it’s a bit rough to fault them for thinking that they were given the wrong card for the right movie. Faulting the accountants is different. It was totally their freaking job to make sure this was done right, and to immediately jump in and fix it if something went wrong. Otherwise they’re just a waste of space. Which, as it turned out, they were.
Fair point.
This piecehas the most detailed account of what happened behind the stage and it isn’t pretty.
First of all there doesn’t seem to have been a clearcut procedure about what to do:
This is too vague. There should have been precise instructions for each person and it should have been rehearsed thoroughly. You can’t just leave such things for a “game-time decision”
Not surprisingly in the actual event both Cullinan and Ruiz seem to have frozen:
Natoli, aka Headphone Guy, was the stage manager and he bears some responsibility too. He should have insisted on a clear back-up plan from the PWC people and made sure it was thoroughly rehearsed.
All this is common sense but when you take into account the Miss Universe debacle just a couple of years ago, a perfect wake-up call if there ever was one, the level of incompetence reaches mind-boggling proportions.
Yes, exactly. And I never said it was a blatant example in the first place, just one with a heavy undercurrent. My point was more that it was far more a “message movie” than Moonlight is.
Wow.
Really, this explains everything. They didn’t practice what to do if there was an error?
Why on earth would you not run a few drills and have a very clear idea what PRECISELY to do if this happens?
That said, the fact the accountants are getting death threats is beyond ridiculous and into lunacy. It’s not as if Moonlight actually lost the award as the result of an error. Hell, if anything, both movvies will get a few more bucks out of the extra attention paid to this - it was a low-rated Oscars and this is sustaining interest.
Not really – the relevant part starts around 4:00 and they’re pretty much wandering off on other topics from around 15:00 or so. No earthshaking revelations but it was interesting hearing Kimmel chatting about it. My favorite line about the two accountants – something along the lines of “these are not the people you want watching your six-year old around the pool”.
Was it already mentioned in this thread what a clusterfuck it would have been if the switcheroo had gone the other way? Ohhh man. :eek:
Thanks for finding the info Lantern. This was my point all along, that without an established procedure and clearly defined responsibilities, PWC and the academy cannot rely on common sense and “do the right thing” to prevail. When the show is live and all the real stars are there, with all the glitz and glamor and bright lights and live TV, any reliance on ‘fix it’ or ‘do the right thing’ or ‘get it right’ is not a procedure at all, it is wishful thinking. The accountants, we now know, had their deer in the headlights moment and failed to act. A rehearsed procedure would not be a guarantee that the gaffe would’ve been handled better, but the likelihood of that would’ve been much better.
In light of the new information, the above no longer is a fair point. While the accountants are not blameless, (and yes they could have handled it better (so too could Warren Beatty)), the majority of the responsibilities shifts away from the accountants and more firmly onto the PWC and the academy personnel in charge of the operations.
Exactly.
I disagree, and I also disagree with the conclusion that this “explains everything”. It might explain some things, might shift some of the blame to production management, but the fact remains with respect to the two accountants that it was their one and only critical job to do this right and to act immediately if it went wrong, and they failed at both. If their management lacked a sufficiently specific plan, they should at least have had one in their own minds, and at least been alert and doing their job instead of ogling the scenery. It sounds like they did neither. According to the account upthread, Cullinan and Ruiz – the only ones who knew the winner – apparently froze and did nothing when the wrong one was announced.
I quite like the comment from the Kimmel interview about whether you’d let these two clowns watch your small children at poolside. You might not have a detailed specific plan for what to do in every possible contingency, but reasonable people charged with that duty would certainly stay alert and certainly have a Step 1: if a child falls in, you don’t stand around with your thumb up your ass, you go in immediately. You don’t need a more complicated plan. These two doofuses would have been asleep in the sun chairs. No, this wasn’t a life-and-death matter, but it was a pretty serious responsibility and their failure had major repercussions on how the most celebrated event in the whole entertainment industry ended, to the detriment of everyone involved.
Yeah, I mean: I guess it wasn’t their only job, because their job was also to hand the envelopes to the presenters and safeguard them until that time. But if they weren’t supposed to intervene in case of error, then there’s no reason to even teach them what the actual award winners’ names are.
Apparently some news source gave out the accountants’ home addresses and they’re getting death threats. They had to hire bodyguards.
Keep in mind that Cullinan and Ruiz aren’t junior PWC employees. They are both partners and Cullinan in particular is a 30+year PWC veteran. He could and should have insisted on clear protocols. But yes it was also the responsibility of the organizers to prepare such protocols.
The crux of the matter was whose responsibility it was to walk on stage if there was a mistake and what exactly they were supposed to do. That is an intimidating task which is why it should have been precisely defined and rehearsed.
However even in the absence of clear protocols, Cullinan should have taken the initiative especially since it was his mistake with the envelopes that caused the problem in the first place. It was a test of his courage and leadership and he failed.
So I would say the bulk of the blame falls on Cullinan but some of it also falls on the organizers for not having clearcut and properly rehearsed contingency plans.
The other interesting aspect of this is the PR strategy after the fiasco. Natoli has been quite active blaming Cullinan and Ruiz but the latter have been silent, possibly on the instructions of PWC. I think that is a mistake both for the company and for them personally. They should talk to the media and issue a heartfelt apology.
Assuming the PWC employees knew who the stage manager was, and he knew that they knew this, then I can’t really fault him or the Academy generally for not practicing or having a specific plan, and just assuming that in the event an incorrect name was read, that one or both of the PWC people would immediately go tell the stage manager. Once they do that, it’s on him to take charge and sort it out.
I think these are my favorite four posts ever on the SDMB. Sums it up quite nicely!
This might have been linked to previously, but The Wrap ran a piece in which one of the stage managers described exactly what happened, and even described a discussion the day before with the PwC accountants about what to do.
Remember, only the accountants knew the correct names, and it took them well over a minute to mention that there was an error.
In my opinion, the blame falls entirely on the two PwC accountants.
Edited to add, even though he’s supposed to have the winners memorized, he’s clearly unsure about whether the right name was called. First, he only had to memorize the names of 24 winners, and of that, the key one to memorize and probably the easiest would be the Best Picture winner.
Plus he still had the Best Picture envelope…right?