And the winner … isn’t: Insiders remember Oscars’ biggest flub
Mara Buxbaum saw it all. In the front row at the 2017 Academy Awards, sandwiched between clients Casey Affleck and Michelle Williams, the president of ID public relations was having a fabulous night. Affleck won for best actor, Williams had been nominated as best supporting actress — both for performances in “Manchester by the Sea” — and the Best Picture award was imminent.
Poised to give out the night’s most coveted prize, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway walked up to the presenter’s microphone. Having entered from stage left, red envelope in hand, Beatty broke the seal and extracted the ecru card from inside. Looking at it with a bit of bemusement, he appeared to be milking the moment.
Haltingly, Beatty said, “And the Academy Award . . .” More hesitation. “For Best Picture . . .” He looked at Dunaway and smiled as if sharing an inside joke.
She waved her hands at her old “Bonnie and Clyde” co-star and said, “You’re impossible . . . C’mon.”
Happy to oblige — a source would later describe this move as “punting” — Beatty handed her the card. Barely glancing at it, Dunaway, a notorious loose cannon, blurted out, “La La Land.”
The crew from that movie jumped up from their seats. They jauntily strode to the stage. In the spotlight, producer Jordan Horowitz launched into an acceptance speech and held his golden boy.
Then, Buxbaum recalls, things got weird. “The stage-manager was standing in the aisle next us,” she says. “He wore a headset. Before anyone at home knew what was going on, we overhead him: ‘Get them off the stage. “Moonlight” won.’ ”
Jimmy Kimmel, host of the awards show, must have overheard the stage manager as well.
Kimmel sat right behind Buxbaum, alongside Matt Damon, with whom he planned to do a cheeky closing-show bit about Damon getting snubbed. Suddenly, though, Kimmel perked up.
Buxbaum heard him say, “I think I should get on stage right now.”
“Envelopegate” will go down as one of the strangest things to ever happen at the Oscars. An executive from ABC, which aired the show, called the unfortunate incident “the worst thing . . . that could have happened.” Show host Jimmy Kimmel told Hollywood Reporter, “It was very awkward, but I revel in awkwardness.”
Minutes after the miss-call Beatty did what he could to make sure he would not take heat for being an all-too-elder statesman. “Warren didn’t want to give up the envelope,” Buxbaum says. “Presumably, [he wanted] to prove he was handed the wrong one.”
Indeed, Beatty said to Academy publicist Teni Melidonian, “You may see the envelope. You may not have the envelope.”
He stuck to his guns and Melidonian could see the truth: The card from inside the envelope read “Emma Stone, ‘La La Land’ ” — a winner from earlier in the night. As Melidonian told Hollywood Reporter, “I’m thinking, ‘Oh, God. How did this happen?’ ”
Backstage, Beatty held high the errant card and envelope, successfully keeping it from the clutches of a security guard. On the phone with wife Annette Benning, Beatty reportedly said, “I have the envelope and I’m not giving it to anyone.”
That night, at the after parties, Envelopegate hijacked all other conversation. Attendees at the Governors Ball speculated that Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand, the accounting firm that had long been charged with tallying votes and controlling the envelopes, would be sacked.
But, according to Tim Gray, senior vice president of Variety magazine, those in the know recognized that dispatching the company would be tricky. “PwC is also the accountant for the Academy,” he told The Post. “They have deep ties. There was a lot of eye-rolling and the Academy was embarrassed.”
By the next day, it was clear that the accounting firm was to blame — particularly, fault fell at the feet of Brian Cullinan, a board member with Price Waterhouse.
A hammy fixture at the Academy Awards, he relished posing on the red carpet. In 2016, the CPA sounded surprisingly star struck as he gushed to Journal of Accountancy, “Last year, I delivered the envelope to Julie Andrews . . . It was pretty amazing to get to meet her and say hello.” In 2017, on the big night, he mugged for red-carpet photos and ostentatiously brandished his briefcase loaded with Oscar winners. Backstage, he was snapping pictures with his phone and posting them to social media.
Almost immediately, Hollywood was dissecting how it all happened. Producer Michael De Luca jokingly likened the mystery to an episode of “Murder, She Wrote.”
The investigation would reveal to the general public the intricacies of Oscar voting and awarding protocol.
In 2017, it began with 6,687 members of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences voting on 24 categories. The filled-out ballots were then sent to the headquarters of Price Waterhouse, where six people divided up the ballots so that nobody could know the winner. “Then,” according to Gray, “the totals were given to two senior people.”
That year it was Cullinan and firm partner Martha Ruiz.
They tallied the votes and, as per Gray, “were the only ones who know the winners.”
The two accountants showed up at the Oscars, each with a full set of winners. Envelopes holding award-winner cards were laid out on two tables — one stage-right and other stage-left. Presenters entering the stage, from right or left, were handed the appropriate cards. As the night wore on, each accountant had a number of leftover cards.
Melidonian told Hollywood Reporter exactly where things went awry: “The lead actress envelope, which Leo [DiCaprio] handed to Emma Stone, came from Martha, so it made sense that Brian would have had the extra lead actress envelope. The protocol was that he would have it out until the winner was called, and then he would put it back in his suitcase — which he failed to do because he was distracted by tweeting” the photo that he had taken of Emma Stone backstage with her new Oscar.
His mistake was compounded by the fact that Cullinan failed to stop the debacle. “They should have immediately run on stage and announced that a mistake had been made,” Gray says. “They alerted people backstage but did it kind of slowly. It was at least a full minute before somebody came out with the right envelope.”
At the point, a Hollywood scrum materialized on stage. Production bigwigs, Cullinan (he is a bit of a Matt Damon doppelganger, which made the whole thing resemble a show-closing gag) and the “La La Land” crew intermingled chaotically. Finally, “La La” producer Horowitz took it upon himself to step up to the mike and announce, “There’s been a mistake.”
He held up the actual best-picture card and added, “ ‘Moonlight’ — you guys won best picture.”
Viewing it all from a seat in the balcony, Gray said, “For the winners it was traumatic. For me” — and for millions of others — “it was great television.”
By the next morning, Damien Chazelle (the “La La Land” director who had Hollywood’s ultimate accolade snatched from his hands) and Barry Jenkins (who helmed “Moonlight” and was the proper winner) held no grudges. They made that clear in front of photographer Gavin Bond’s Nikon camera.
Variety magazine has made it a tradition to photograph the Best Picture director the morning after the Oscars. Ordinarily, Jenkins would have been a solo subject. But, in light of the fiasco, Jenkins suggested that he and Chazelle be photographed together. So they convened at the Hollywood home where Bond was staying (an impressive spread that had been built by Cecil B. DeMille). “There seemed to be real camaraderie,” Bond told The Post. “The attitude was, ‘s–t happens.’ They were both laughing and there were no hard feelings.”
As Jenkins said to Chazelle during the photo session, “If the roles were reversed and we had been up on stage, and the cards had gotten switched, I hope we would have been as gracious as you guys were in bringing us up.”
A repeat goof-up of that caliber seems unlikely at this year’s Awards show. The Academy and Price Waterhouse (which was kept as the accounting firm) have made changes to prevent a repeat performance. Since 2018, there are now three Price Waterhouse representative on board (including one in the control room), remedies for potential errors are practiced during Oscar rehearsals and extra scrutiny is given before the awards are handed off.
And presumably, there will be no Instagram shots of award winners from any of the accountants.
“Their singular focus of being at the ceremony is handing the envelopes to the presenters,” said Mao-Lin Shen, a Price Waterhouse director. “The third PwC partner sits with the show’s director as an extra precaution. This partner will have all the winners memorized as well as a set of envelopes with the results. Should something happen on stage regarding the wrong winner being announced this third partner in the control room will alert the show director.”
One final precaution for a smooth-running show on Sunday night? Academy Awards goat Brian Cullinan kept his job at Price Waterhouse, but he will not be in the wings.