And the Oscars culprit is… a tweeting accountant from PwC

As a result, presenter Warren Beatty carried the wrong envelope Sunday night, meaning that his on-stage partner, Faye Dunaway, announced “La La Land” was the victor of the night’s top prize.

Tim Ryan, PwC’s U.S. chairman, told trade magazine Variety he had spoken at length to Mr Cullinan, who was stage left throughout the evening.

He attributed the foul-up to “human error”.

The implications for PwC could be serious and long-lasting, Gordon says, though he added the caveat that changing accountants was expensive; the biggest hit to the company could be its ability to attract new business.

A Wall Street Journal report said Brian Cullinan, one of two PricewaterhouseCoopers partners responsible for handling the envelopes with the names of the Oscar winners, tweeted a picture of actress Emma Stone on Sunday night just three minutes before presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced the wrong Best Picture victor, one of the biggest Oscar foul-ups ever.

“He feels very, very bad and disgusting”, Ryan said. He is very upset about this mistake. Also, The Siegfried Group, one of Accountingfly’s Firm Partners, wrote about networking. According to the Wall Street Journal, the tweet was sent out at 9:05 pm with the caption, “Best Actress Emma Stone Backstage!” CNBC confirmed the tweet was posted through a Google web cache.

As a result, Dunaway mistakenly named “La La Land” as best picture.

Standard Online has contacted PwC for comment.

The firm quickly apologized and said they were “investigating how this could have happened”.

The academy’s statement noted that PwC, formerly Price Waterhouse Coopers, has been entrusted with handling Oscar votes for 83 years but said the academy “will determine what actions are appropriate going forward”.

As Ruiz and Cullinan explained to The Huffington Post, there was no official contingency plan for such a potentially disastrous error because that exact mistake had never quite been made before. The wrong envelope was apparently a duplicate copy of the best actress envelope featuring Stone’s name. Seemingly puzzled, he showed stage-mate Faye Dunaway the card, and she said “La La Land”.

PwC has several measures in place meant to prevent such occurrences.

Another explanation also lies in the fact that the envelope design had been changed this year from red on gold to gold on red, making the writing on the envelopes more hard to read. So.

To the cameras on stage, the misstep was clear.

Beatty, stood alongside Dunaway, opened the envelope but appeared to look instantly confused.

When I asked Martha Ruiz what would happen if someone read off the wrong Oscar victor, either accidently or intentionally, she seemed surprised by the question.

As an additional safety measure, Ruiz and Cullinan memorize the names of the winners. “You just had to get the right name in the right envelope and hand it to the right person”, as Tim Calkins, a clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, told NBC.

Cullinan was on stage, too, fumbling with a red envelope before jogging out of the spotlight.

The Academy has not released a statement.