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Did the Envelope Fiasco Happen Because the Person in Charge Was Too Busy Tweeting?
It's been two days, but everyone is STILL talking about the Best Picture fiasco at the Oscars on Sunday night . . . so in a way, the Academy can't be THAT upset about it being botched that badly.
But here's the latest on how it all went down . . .
The "Wall Street Journal" says that WARREN BEATTY and FAYE DUNAWAY might have been given the wrong envelope because the man who's entrusted with keeping everything straight was preoccupied with Twitter.
His name is Brian Cullinan, and he's a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting firm that counts the votes. He was apparently Tweeting like a madman backstage. He's since deleted those Tweets, but there's a screenshot online of one he took of Emma Stone backstage after she won Best Actress.
That's the moment when he probably SHOULD'VE been prepping the envelope for Best Picture. So maybe he was distracted?
The Oscars are notoriously secretive about the results, and Brian and his partner Martha Ruiz may have been the only two to actually KNOW the results. They each have suitcases with an identical set of envelopes, at opposite ends of the stage.
Martha gave HER Best Actress envelope to Leonardo DiCaprio to present to Emma, and she kept it after winning. Then Brian mistakenly gave Warren and Faye the other Best Actress envelope instead of the Best Picture one.
Warren was confused when he opened it because it had Emma's name. Faye thought he was goofing around by stalling . . . so when she looked at it, she just blurted out the name of the movie on the card . . . "La La Land".
Brian and Martha knew that was NOT right, but it took a few minutes for them to relay the problem . . . and get the crew onstage to figure out a way to sort it out.
The accounting firm issued a second apology last night, and someone from the company says, quote, "[Brian] feels very, very terrible and horrible. He's very upset about this mistake." There's no comment on the Twitter thing.
Also, the Oscars changed the look of the envelopes this year, from red writing on gold envelopes to gold on red, which might have made them harder to read.
And TMZ says Warren and Faye bickered at the rehearsal over who would get to read the winner. Eventually, Warren caved and let her do it, but maybe that's why she read the card so quickly . . . because she didn't want him stealing her thunder.
(Jimmy Kimmel broke everything down on his show last night. And here's an official statement from the Oscars.)