2017 Academy Awards Best Picture Gaffe

Submission 24,091

Part of a series on Academy Awards. [View Related Entries]

About

At the 2017 Academy Awards, actors Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway erroneously announced that the winner for Best Picture was La La Land when in fact it was Moonlight. The resulting confusion and controversy dominated the following morning's coverage and social media discussion of the Oscars.

Origin

At the 2017 Academy Awards, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, stars of 1967's Bonnie and Clyde, were the presenters announcing the winner for Best Picture. After Beatty opened the envelope containing the winner, he appeared confused. He showed the card to Dunaway, who announced that La La Land, the favorite going into the Oscars, had won best picture. After three minutes of the La La Land producers' acceptance speeches, Academy Awards producers rushed the stage to explain there had been a mistake. Beatty had been given the envelope which had the winner for Best Actress in a Leading Role, which had recently been awarded to Emma Stone for her performance in La La Land. As the situation became clear on stage, La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz took the microphone and said announced that there had been a mistake, and that Moonlight had won best picture. He assured a confused audience that he was not making a joke before taking the card which stated Moonlight had won Best Picture and showing it to the cameras for confirmation.

Spread

The gaffe instantly became the leading story about the Oscars, overshadowing _Moonlight_'s win. While the team behind La La Land received praise for handling the situation with class,^[1] confusion still abounded as to how the gaffe actually happened. Emma Stone, while clarifying that she was extremely happy for Moonlight, caused confusion when she noted that after her envelope containing her award for Best Actress was handed for her, she never let it go, so she was unsure how Beatty could have it.^[2]

An investigation by Quartz^[3] suggested that there had been two cards, held by Brian Cullinan and Martha Ruiz of the professional services firm PwC, which oversees balloting at the Academy.

Social media users instantly responded to the gaffe with memes.^[5] For example, Twitter user @sporker_^[4] put the Crying Jordan faces on the La La Land poster and gained over 4,600 retweets.

One of the most popular jokes on Twitter involved taking the shot when the camera showed Best Picture card in Horowitz' hands and photoshopping the text to read something else. Those jokes were compiled into a Twitter Moment^[6] the following day.

Steve Harvey Jokes

The incident reminded many of Steve Harvey's Miss Universe 2015 Gaffe, in which the television host read the wrong winner off his card at the 2015 Miss Universe competition. Host Jimmy Kimmel joked that Harvey was to blame for the snafu. Twitter abounded with jokes connecting the two gaffes.^[7] In good humor, Harvey tweeted support to Warren Beatty (shown below).