The horror! The horror!

Shirley MacLaine ‘processing the horror’ of Warren Beatty’s Oscar fiasco

Bryan Alexander , USA TODAY

Published 5:59 p.m. ET Feb. 28, 2017 |

Updated 9:06 a.m. ET March 1, 2017

Shirley MacLaine felt her younger brother Warren Beatty's pain during Sunday's big Oscar flub.

Beatty was given the wrong envelope and thus co-presenter Faye Dunaway read the wrong winner for the best picture award. There was an historically chaotic scene and MacLaine, who had presented an award just before, was in the audience watching.

“I think we’re all processing the horror of it," MacLaine tells USA TODAY. “I’m still dealing with it.”

“I’m concerned with how (Beatty) must have felt being so close to him. I’m three years older and I’m protective," MacLaine says. “We know how difficult it was for him, but it was also for me.”

MacLaine, 82, says she called Beatty, 79, "immediately" after the show.

"He was backstage dealing with what he was going through. He didn’t answer his phone," MacLaine says. "And then I called the home and (wife Annette Bening) answered and we talked. And that’s all I’m going to say.”

MacLaine stopped briefly at the Governors Ball party after the show. But ended up heading out.

"I just wanted to go home. It’s something to really think about, what if it happened to you?" MacLaine says.

“I’m basically a mystic. And I’m wondering what was that all about? And I am not sure yet. I have to think about it some more," says MacLaine. “The one thing you learned about what occurred at the Oscars is that every instant of life is important. And anything like that can happen to you, driving in a car, leading a seminar, working at your desk and presenting an award."

Blogger's Commentary. It's hard to know where to begin here, but at the same time, I really don't need to say anything, do I? When you think of the real horrors that have happened in recent times with terrorist attacks in public places, the bloodshed and mayhem, this was a harmless little boo-boo which should be laughed off. It was NOTHING compared to those atrocities. 

The implication is that in a spectacle as posh and elite as the Oscars, you can't have anything embarrassing or painful happen. It's like a rich man suffering misfortune. Everyone gasps, not in horror so much as surprise.  A mistake has been made. Wait - what?

No matter what the Academy believes, the Oscars is (are?) not immune to real horror. That "improvised" episode with the busload of tourists (not spontaneous at all but carefully planned and rehearsed) included a convicted felon who had just gotten out of jail for, among other things, attempted rape. He glad-handed and stole the show for several minutes. Obviously, Oscar security was lousy if it let a scumbag like that enter the building, let alone hog the spotlight for several minutes.

All this bumph about how meticulously-prepared these shows are, about how many fail-safe systems they have built in so that NOTHING can go wrong. . . it makes me feel worse, actually, about that convict getting in and flying under the radar. Think what might have happened if his mind tilted in a slightly different direction, or if he was slightly armed.

So now we have this shrivelled old grand dame who is "basically" a mystic (so she doesn't come with mystical accessories?), calling the Best Picture bleep-up a disaster on the scale of the Titanic. I used to like Shirley MacLaine, but something happened to her at some point. Her values, if she ever had any, have disintegrated. "Processing the horror", indeed. It was a mistake, Shirl, so get over it. By Oscar standards, it was a big one. There will be repercussions. But no one was hurt. No one died.

And everything else is replaceable.

My last word on the Oscars screwup

There's a kind of magic in being able to read the Best Picture winner from an envelope clearly marked Actress in a Leading Role.

Either that, or it's just plain stupid.

Even more stupid are these accountants! They had ONE JOB, and they (or he - it was Brian Cullinan who actually screwed it up) were unable to perform it correctly. 

Their earnest explanation of how foolproof their little system is now rings sort of hollow. This is a quote from the Huffington Post:

In a blog post published on Medium this month, Brian Cullinan and Martha Ruiz of the firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, explained the process of handling the envelopes for the Oscars. Mr. Cullinan wrote that he and Ms. Ruiz each had a full set of envelopes and stood on opposite sides of the stage, where they handed envelopes to presenters.

“It doesn’t sound very complicated,” Mr. Cullinan said, “but you have to make sure you’re giving the presenter the right envelope.”

Ahead of the show, both Ruiz and Cullinan seemed assured that no mistake of that kind would be made.

Cullinan told The Huffington Post before the ceremony that if a wrong winner were to be called, “We would make sure that the correct person was known very quickly. Whether that entails stopping the show, us walking onstage, us signaling to the stage manager — that’s really a game-time decision, if something like that were to happen. ”

He added, “Again, it’s so unlikely.”

 

                      (Proud of yourself, Brian?)

Blogger's note. The above image may be a clue to the whole thing. Brian Cullinan, whose sole responsibility was to hand Warren Beatty the Best Picture envelope, got starstruck and distracted, posting this tweet of Emma Stone only a couple of minutes before he was to perform his incredibly difficult envelope-handing duty. Somehow or other, he neglected to look at what was written on the envelope, or didn't bother, or just assumed it was the right one. Or - didn't care.

What was written on the envelope was: Actress in a leading role. The category Emma Stone had just won. The same Emma Stone he was tweeting photos of and drooling over. 

So did the real envelope get stuck to the bottom of his shoe with a blob of gum, or what? Nobody ever sufficiently explained where the actual envelope came from, who found it, ANY of that.  The obnoxious La La Land guy, the one who snatched the card out of Warren Beatty's hand, later said "it just appeared out of somewhere". Great. With this level of insight, I am sure things will function much better next year.

But here's another weirdball detail. Brian Cullinan and that chick, you know, Martha Ruiz, kept saying there were TWO briefcases, containing two identical sets of envelopes with the names of the winners.

One for Brian. One for Martha. 

Explain this, then!:

I see three. Do YOU see three? Can't these guys count? They're accountants, aren't they? What the fuck is going on here?

With so many identical black briefcases being juggled around, each containing God knows what, is it so surprising that it got mixed up?

Well, yes, it IS surprising, to me. Any alert five-year-old could hand over an envelope without screwing it up. I think I did it in kindergarten.

You will always be remembered as the man who fucked up the Oscars, Brian. That sound you hear? It's not a waterfall or a rushing stream. It's your career being flushed down the toilet.

(Let's see this one more time.)

Update. All right, just ONE more thing! Look at these tasty photos of Brian Cullinan (as if we needed any more evidence that the envelopes were screwed up):

Brian Cullinan backstage (that looks like Warren Beatty getting hugged, and Emma Stone with her hair pulled back). Note the red circle marked "envelopes".

ZOOM IN! We see that in his left hand, Cullinan has two envelopes and a phone. ONE of those envelopes must be the right one for Best Picture! And the other one is, well. . . uhh. . . (the one he gave Warren Beatty).

And here he is tweeting away, starstruck and wanting to align himself with all that glamour. (These are tweets that he madly deleted as soon as the shit hit the fan). The theory is, he was too distracted by social media to do the ONE JOB he was supposed to do that night. 

The more I think about this, the worse it gets. He obviously did not even look at the envelope he handed over to Warren Beatty, nor did he look at the one he still had in his hand.

Or maybe he did!

Maybe he KNEW he got it wrong, panicked, didn't know what to do, and pulled a Teddy Kennedy at Chappaquiddick (sorry, you have to be pretty old to remember this) and just pretended it didn't happen. 

Hoped it would go away.

Most people are thinking in terms of: "they" only knew when the title came out of Faye Dunaway's mouth. But it's possible this guy knew almost right away - if he even glanced down at the card he still had in his hand. If so, he stood there doing nothing, not just while they announced the erroneous winner, but all through the reading of the nominees and the relevant film clips (a process which seemingly takes forever). That's a lot of time to stop the proceedings, go onstage and say, "Sorry, folks, I screwed up."

We hear today his involvement with the Oscars has been terminated, but he still hasn't been fired. It's a mystery as to why. As one wag put it: "Would you want HIM doing your taxes?" But perhaps the firm believes that firing him would be too much of an admission of guilt and would wreck their chances at the Oscars next year.

Meryl Streep at the Oscars: my new, improved gif!

I managed to salvage five images from the internet of Meryl Streep's unforgettable reaction to the Oscars screwup, in which Best Picture was awarded to the wrong movie. Turned out that, because they were taken quite close together and she was looking straight into the camera (gee, I wonder why?), they made quite a nice gif. It does seem amazing, however, that she wasn't looking at the stage at the time. She was looking at. . . whoever. Whoever had the camera on her at that moment.

Speaking of Oscars, can't we give her an honorary one just for this?

"Jaw-dropping": Celebrities react to the Oscar screwup

These reactions are unlike anything you'll ever see again (I hope) at the Oscars. People have just realized that the wrong movie was announced as Best Picture (La La Land instead of the real winner, Moonlight). This was jaw-dropping in the most literal sense of the word. Just look at all those open mouths! People seem stunned. Frozen. Hands shoot up to faces. Meryl Streep's eyes bulge out melodramatically. She looks utterly horrified, shocked, as if it were the end of the world. Shirley MacLaine just needs help! Her brother Warren Beatty has just screwed up in front of the whole world (or so everyone claimed - in truth, he was just given the wrong envelope and didn't know how to handle it).

People are comparing this image in particular to a Renaissance painting, one of those group ones where everyone's in a snit about something, or waiting for the Judgement Day, or whatever. Due to my blog limitations, I can't blow it up very much unless I cut it into little pieces:

Here you can truly see where these people's priorities lie, and how ill-prepared they are for anything outside a movie studio, where you can fix a problem with one more take (or gobs of money).

Though these are not an exact match - hey, I don't have THAT much time to spend on this! - and I don't know who the artists are (ditto), you get the idea.
People don't know how ridiculous they look when caught off-guard. I couldn't help but notice that Sammy Davis Jr., the standup comedian and stage actor, handled the wrong-envelope fluff much more smoothly than did his movie star counterparts. These people don't even face audiences except at awards shows. They don't know how to do anything live. 

Warren Beatty has always struck me as looking like a stunned rabbit. He has been so worked-on that you can't tell if he's panic-stricken or not. Maybe he's just being himself. The plastic surgery just hasn't worn very well, as it never does: it all comes unstuck after a while, the nose caves in, the muscles begin to tug and pull unnaturally - or naturally, trying desperately to get the face back to some sort of original shape before death.

ALWAYS FINDING MORE DEPT. Here's perhaps the best group shot I've found:

. . . with this outstanding detail:

The big Oscar screwup: how could this happen??

Unless you've been living in a hole, you've heard about what happened at the Oscars last night. I mean, when the Best Picture award (crown jewel of the evening) was announced.

Announced WRONG.

There are lots of gifs of this gaffe (a gif of a gaffe!), but most of them are half a second long. I don't know why entertainment websites do this. It's true that longer ones have to sort of download each time you play them, which means they go through one full cycle before playing at the right speed. So somehow they prefer jerk, jerk, jerk to an attractive still picture. This is why so many people hate gifs.

Mine are at least ten seconds long, sometimes 15. Anyway, in this one, the producer of La La Land, who was just told his movie won Best Picture, has to hand the award away to the producer of Moonlight (whose movie ACTUALLY won Best Picture). Confused? I don't blame you. What I like most of all is the way people are milling around, going this way and that, not knowing where they are supposed to be. Has anyone ever been dragged off the stage after winning Best Picture?

In this one, Warren Beatty (who didn't announce the erroneous winner, but handed the card to Faye Dunaway so SHE would make the fatal mistake) tries to make an excuse for what happened. He
"explains" that the card said "Best Actress, Emma Stone" on it.

He knew there was a problem. He knew there was a mistake.

This wasn't the right card. It couldn't be. It didn't say Best Picture on it. It said Best Actress, Emma Stone.

So why didn't he say, "Uhh, guys, this is the wrong card"? Instead, he just handed it over for Faye Dunaway to deal with. It's called passing the buck.

There are those who are saying it's unthinkable to correct the Academy, to show them up as having made a mistake. Better that it land on your own head! People are saying this has never happened before. But the wrong envelope was given to Sammy Davis Jr., years ago, when he was presenting a music award. Fortunately he knew enough about the music industry (and imagine someone being educated in their field!) to say, "Sorry, folks, I was given the wrong envelope." The mistake was very quickly corrected and the show went on with a minimum of embarrassment, though someone's head probably rolled.

Gasps, tears, shouts of joy, phony congratulations from the La La Land people. Imagine how they must feel. I mean - imagine how they must REALLY feel, as opposed to what they are allowed to show.

Sorry about all the long shots. There were a lot of quick cutaways because the camera guys just didn't know what to do. There are always a number of perspectives to choose from, so the producers/directors (or whoever does it) had to make some quick choices as to whose reactions to avoid.

Jimmy Kimmel, profoundly embarrassed that the biggest gig of his life had to end this way.

Sammy Davis Jr., making everyone laugh (a sure audience tension-reliever and a way to dispel embarrassment), then getting it right. Nice save.

A super-jerky gif from somebody else's site. If you had a shot of this priceless reaction from Meryl Streep and wanted to make a gif of it, why not a 15-second one? It would've been superb. I think this may be an outtake, as I am sure the camera people were trying to avoid winces and frowns. God, the panic!

(From the New York Times) HERE'S how it could happen:

PricewaterhouseCoopers prepares two identical sets of sealed envelopes. The two partners from the firm who oversee the voting process, Martha L. Ruiz and Brian Cullinan, each have a briefcase with a complete set of the envelopes inside and stand on opposite sides of the stage.

The envelope for best actress, the penultimate award of the night, came from the side of the stage where Ms. Ruiz stood.

After Ms. Stone accepted that honor, Ms. Dunaway and Mr. Beatty came out to present the best picture award from Mr. Cullinan’s side of the stage, where a best actress envelope was still unopened. Mr. Cullinan clearly handed Mr. Beatty the wrong envelope.

After Mr. Cullinan and Ms. Ruiz realized that the wrong winner had been announced, they notified the stage manager, which set in motion a chaotic scene onstage. Those details, provided by two people familiar with the process who were not authorized to speak publicly, helped clarify some of the details of what happened onstage Sunday night.

Yet it still took more than two minutes between Ms. Dunaway announcing “La La Land” as best picture and an announcement from the “La La Land” producers that “Moonlight” was in fact the winner. Three “La La Land” producers had given acceptance speeches before the mistake was announced.

Exactly how the confusion resulting in Mr. Beatty’s being handed the wrong envelope occurred is not fully known. But it could have to do with the design. PricewaterhouseCoopers used a new envelope this year, featuring red paper with gold lettering that specifies the award inside. That may have made the outside of the envelopes more difficult to read than last year’s envelopes, which featured gold paper and red lettering. The academy is responsible for the envelope design.

Blogger's note. Mr. Cullinan, you are officially screwed.

Oh, and one more thing. That gif of Meryl Streep "reacting"? It's fake. Or at least, it's the wrong one (speaking of the wrong one). Either that, or THIS one is wrong. I like the way she seems to be saying, "NO - !"