From Warren Beatty to the Accountants: Who’s to Blame For Oscar’s Best Picture Snafu?

It’s only the morning after, and already we’ve seen dozens of post-mortems on the Best Picture cock-up that had La La Land being declared the 2016 Best Picture only to have the correct winner, Moonlight, announced by once of the La La Land producers in a chaotic moment the likes of which the Oscars have never seen. How did this happen? Whose fault was it? Who should we feel bad for?

Whose Fault Was It?

First up to publicly apologize — and attempt to explain — was accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers, who have been in charge of the balloting, vote tabulation, and (most pertinent in this case) envelopes declaring the winners for the past 83 years. So: only one catastrophic mix-up in 83 years! They have a better record than you do, put in that way. Anyway, their statement read …

We sincerely apologize to Moonlight, La La Land, Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, and Oscar viewers for the error that was made during the award announcement for best picture. The presenters had mistakenly been given the wrong category envelope and when discovered, was immediately corrected. We are currently investigating how this could have happened, and deeply regret that this occurred. We appreciate the grace with which the nominees, the Academy, ABC, and Jimmy Kimmel handled the situation.

There, in one mea culpa, PriceWaterhouse laid out most of the major players. Certainly if there is a prime-mover of the whole debacle, it was that someone (presumably one of the two representatives from the accounting firm who keep the envelopes) handed Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway the wrong envelope — the duplicate envelope for Best Actress (there are two sets of envelopes at every Oscars ceremony, just in case). From there, the flow-chart of blame goes like this:

• Warren Beatty: Looks at what’s written on the envelope, pauses, looks again, looks offstage, but since the powers of telepathy haven’t been invented, no one yet knows that anything is wrong, and since Warren is getting up there in years, everyone assumes it’s Elizabeth Taylor and Gladiator all over again. Meanwhile, Faye Dunaway is playfully (but actually) exasperated with what looks like Warren mugging for the moment. In Warren’s biggest mistake, he just hands Dunaway the envelope without any kind of context, perhaps to avoid taking the bullet. Why didn’t he just say “I think we have the wrong envelope”? If there’s any blame to fall on Warren Beatty, it’s for that. But then the hot potato goes to…
• Faye Dunaway: Perhaps the most blameless of anyone involved, even if she was the one who ultimately read the name. After watching Beatty futz around, seemingly for attention, Dunaway was clearly in “let’s get on with it” mode. She took the envelope, glanced at it, saw the words “La La Land” — the movie we all expected was going to win anyway — and said it aloud. At which point the blame falls back to …
• The Accountants: According to Vanity Fair‘s Rebecca Keegan in the below-embedded video …

How It Went Wrong

At this point, backstage went crazy, because the accountants knew that Moonlight was the winner. They probably should have gotten to the mic before anyone from La La La Land could, but you can imagine being the lowly accountant in the wings wouldn’t give you a whole lot of confidence in your ability to halt the entire Oscar broadcast on your say-so.

So now La La Land is on stage, its producers are giving their speeches: first Jordan Horowitz (more on him in a second), then Marc Platt, and then — as Slate pointed out — people from production have come out on to the stage, examined the envelope that Beatty and Dunaway had read, and have begin to tell people Moonlight actually win, before producer Fred Berger steps up to give his speech. He’s the one who ended his speech with “we lost, by the way.”

Here’s where La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz deserves his due credit, as he took the mic and made it clear to the audience and to the Moonlight people that Moonlight had actually won. In a moment that had to have been hugely dispiriting to him personally, he made sure to put the spotlight on the representatives of the film that, despite now having won, was having its big moment usurped by a scrum on stage.

At which point, chaos reigned for a few moments, Jimmy Kimmel tried to do his job, which was to make everything less awkward with comedy. Which was probably not the best option, since many of the backstage accounts from celebrities mentioned that they thought the confusion was a bit, perhaps one last Kimmel-Matt Damon gag.

Meanwhile, the Oscars audience looked like this:

Take your pick of whose face you want to focus on in this pic? Meryl Streep’s? Matt Damon’s? The Rock? David Oyelowo? Michelle Williams and Busy Philipps? Ben Affleck’s sideways glance? Casey Affleck’s chin-stroking? Mel Gibson and Salma Hayek’s raised eyebrow’s Sting’s relative bemusement? Cheryl Boone Isaacs “oh shit, I’m gonna have to deal with this” face? It’s a tableau worthy of the Smithsonian, and I’m really not kidding.

The Aftermath

By the time the Moonlight team made it up to the stage, the confusion was beginning to iron out: this wasn’t a joke or a gag; this wasn’t a tie; Warren Beatty had explained himself as best he could: Moonlight was the Best Picture winner. Barry Jenkins gave some version of his speech, during which he shouted out the La La Land producers, with whom he’d been traveling the Oscar-precursor circuit for the last few months.

And that’s the thing that’s really striking about Moonlight winning after such an intensely bizarre moment. The Moonlight people and the La La Land people really seemed to like each other, to support each other. It’s a business, and winning an Oscar means big business, but it’s also an artform, and seeing photos of Jenkins and Horowitz embracing — on stage and in later photos from various after-parties — was a nice reminder that this doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. And while we can pass around blame for the mix-up like a fun parlor game, the artists in question don’t have to be in combat simply because they were in competition.