Academy apologizes for Oscar’s best picture fiasco, vows ‘action’

You may have heard that something wonderfully unexpected happened at the Oscars last night.

Damien Chazelle’s Calgary grandmother, Constance Martin, says she was delighted about her grandson’s best-director win at Sunday’s Oscars, but thinks the unprecedented mix-up at the end of the night that led to La La Land mistakenly announced as victor of Best Picture was “very unfortunate”. But there had been an envelope mix-up. Emma Stone won the category for her role in La La Land.

“I don’t know if it diminished the celebration for us; it just made it much more complicated”, Jenkins replied.

After a dramatic pause, Beatty incorrectly announced La La Land as the victor. The Best Picture prize was actually awarded to “Moonlight”.

Best supporting actor and actress award winners were Mahershala Ali for Moonlight and Viola Davis for Fences.

“We deeply regret the mistakes that were made during the presentation of the Best Picture category during last night’s Oscar ceremony”, the Academy wrote in a statement.

“It’s messy, but it’s kind of gorgeous”, Moonlight’s writer-director Jenkins told Variety, revealing that he first watched the moment back on his phone at 3am on Monday morning. We can’t say we’d have been that mature about it in the moment.

“I can’t comment around the specifics of our relationship with the academy”, he said.

After re-watching footage, Cullinan is clearly visible onstage looking at his envelope, and then quietly sneaking into the background.

The host for the glittery evening, Jimmy Kimmel, tried to save the day by blaming the whole gaffe on Steve Harvey.

Barry Jenkins’ tender, bathed-in-blue coming-of-age drama, made for just $1.5 million, is an unusually small Oscar victor. The Best Foreign Language Film went to “The Salesman”, whose director was absent from the ceremony in protest of the recent travel ban that President Donald Trump’s administration imposed. Because doing so may be the difference between dreaming at all and, somehow through the Academy’s grace, realizing dreams you never allowed yourself to have.

‘What happened was, our partner on the left side of the stage, Brian Cullinan, he handed the wrong envelope to Warren Beatty, ‘ explained Tim Ryan, U.S. chairman and senior partner of PWC. And I think that will (and continues to) be the reason why people have seen the film and will continue to see it.