So I was up way too late on Sunday watching the Oscars, which is a mistake I make every single year and never learn from. My cable box has this maddening habit of running a few seconds behind live broadcast whenever a lot of people are streaming at once, and around 11:45 my phone started lighting up with tweets about Best Picture before the actual announcement had even happened on my TV. That's its own complaint for another day. But it meant I watched the whole "La La Land wins" moment already knowing something was wrong, which honestly made it weirder than just watching it cold.
For anyone who somehow missed it: Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway came out to present Best Picture, Beatty opened the envelope, paused for a long beat that in hindsight was clearly him going "wait, this isn't right," and then just handed it to Dunaway anyway. She read "La La Land." The whole cast and crew went up, producer Jordan Horowitz started his speech, and then people with earpieces started running onstage waving papers around. Turned out the actual winner was Moonlight, and Barry Jenkins ended up giving his acceptance speech to a room that had already sort of half-celebrated a different movie for two minutes.
What I keep thinking about isn't the movies, it's the mechanics of it. This is PricewaterhouseCoopers we're talking about, one of the big four accounting firms, whose entire job for the last 83 years of doing this has been "don't mess up the envelopes." They have two people backstage each holding a complete set of duplicate envelopes specifically so a mistake like this can't happen, and it happened anyway because the guy handed Beatty the backup envelope for Actress in a Leading Role instead of the one for Best Picture. Reports afterward said the accountant, Brian Cullinan, had been tweeting a backstage photo of Emma Stone right before he was supposed to be paying attention to which envelope went where. I don't know if that detail is fully confirmed and I'm not going to pretend I have inside sourcing on it, but it's the kind of detail that makes the whole thing feel very 2017 rather than some old-timey Hollywood blunder.
I spend most of my working life thinking about process failures in software, where the fix for "human made a mistake at a critical step" is usually some combination of automation, redundancy, and making the dangerous action harder to do by accident. And here's this system that had redundancy (two sets of envelopes, two people carrying them) and it still failed, because the redundancy was built to catch "an envelope goes missing," not "a person hands over the wrong one with total confidence." That's the failure mode that gets you every time. Not the thing you didn't plan for existing, but the thing you planned for wrong. I've shipped bugs like that. Everybody who's worked on anything with more than one moving part has shipped bugs like that.
Jimmy Kimmel, to his credit, handled it about as well as a host possibly could, at one point joking that he was going to blame Steve Harvey (referencing his infamous Miss Universe flub from a few months back, in case that one's already faded from memory). And Horowitz, the La La Land producer who was mid-speech when he got the news, get real credit here too. He just stopped, said something to the effect of "guys, I'm sorry, there's a mistake, Moonlight won," and physically held up the actual card so people could see it. That's a genuinely hard thing to do gracefully in front of a live audience of tens of millions of people, with your own moment getting taken away from you in real time, and he did it without making it about himself.
Anyway. Moonlight won, La La Land didn't, and somewhere in a PwC office on Monday morning there were some very uncomfortable meetings happening. I went to bed around 12:30, annoyed at my cable box, mildly delighted by the chaos, and pretty sure I'd be thinking about this one for a while.