IT’S PROBABLY SAFE to assume Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue pretty much wrote itself last night as he returned to his late night TV show one day on from his Oscars hosting stint.
The awards ceremony was overshadowed by a massive blunder as Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway presented the Best Picture award.
In a sequence of events likely to live forever as part of TV blooper clip shows, Beatty at first seemed uncertain about what was on the card in the envelope he was given. He showed the card to Dunaway, who had appeared to think he was joking around up to that point.
‘La La Land’ was read out as the winner by Dunaway. The producers and cast took to the stage to celebrate before realising what went wrong and graciously handing the coveted prize over to the creators of ‘Moonlight’.
“Except for the end it was very fun,” Kimmel said, as he returned to his late-night ABC show.
Starting his monologue with a battery of one-liners about the mix-up, he said it was “the weirdest TV ending since Lost,” and compared it to paternity-testing segments that used to feature on daytime shows like ‘Maury Povich’.
‘La La Land’ was both “the biggest winner and loser” of the night, he told his audience.
Noting that Beatty and Dunaway were asked to present the main prize of the night as they were marking the 50th anniversary of their classic crime movie ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, he said of the envelope mix-up:
Clyde threw Bonnie under the bus.
Explaining how he witnessed events develop, he said he was supposed to end the show from a seat in the audience next to Matt Damon.
We’re sitting there and you’re thinking – you know, the host will go on stage and clear this thing up. And then I remember – oh, I’m the host!
Whatever confusion there was about who won – Matt Damon lost.
(Kimmel and Damon have a long-standing comedy feud. Find out more here. If this is the first you’re hearing about it, it’s funnier than it sounds).
PwC partner
Separately, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers has been identified as the culprit for a mixup.
Brian Cullinan handed the wrong envelope to Dunaway and Beatty, according to reports citing the firm and other unnamed sources.
Cullinan had posted a backstage photo of actress Emma Stone on Twitter just moments before the error, according to several reports, and had reportedly been tweeting frequently all night. By yesterday afternoon, the photos had been taken down.
Cullinan, one of two PwC partners charged with holding the envelopes, mistakenly gave Beatty a duplicate copy of Stone’s best actress win for ‘La La Land’.
He hasn’t spoken openly about the error but PwC was quick to circulate an apology vowing to investigate what had gone wrong.
Cullinan and his colleague Martha Ruiz, who have personally handled the Oscars in recent years, recently explained in an interview that two sets of envelopes were on site during the event.
“We stand on opposite sides of the stage, right off-screen, for the entire evening, and we each hand the respective envelope to the presenter,” Cullinan said in the interview published on medium.com.
It doesn’t sound very complicated, but you have to make sure you’re giving the presenter the right envelope.
After Ruiz furnished presenter Leonardo DiCaprio with Stone’s best actress envelope, Cullinan was supposed to ditch his duplicate but mistakenly gave it to Beatty in the place of the best picture envelope.
Tim Ryan, PwC’s US chairman, told trade magazine Variety he had spoken at length to Cullinan, who was stage left throughout the evening.
“He is very upset about this mistake. And it is also my mistake, our mistake and we all feel very bad,” Ryan was quoted as saying.
With reporting from © – AFP 2017
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