OSCARS IN LA LA LAND

Moonlight best picture after Oscars detour into La La Land

MOONLIGHT — not, as it turned out, La La Land — won best picture at the Academy Awards yesterday in a historic Oscar upset and an unprecedented fiasco that saw one winner swapped for another while La La Land’s producers were in mid-speech.

Presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway apparently took the wrong envelope — the one for best actress winner Emma Stone — on to the stage for the final prize.

When they read La La Land as the winner, representatives for ballot tabulator PwC raced onstage to try to stop the acceptance speeches.

Host Jimmy Kimmel came forward to inform the cast that Moonlight had indeed won, showing the inside of the envelope as proof. “I knew I would screw this up,” said Kimmel, a first-time host.

Gasps were heard around the auditorium. Presenters, winners and members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences huddled to discuss the debacle.

Beatty refused to give up the envelopes until he could hand them first to Barry Jenkins for Moonlight. He and La La Land director Damien Chazelle hugged amid the chaos.

“Even in my dreams this cannot be true,” said an astonished Jenkins, once he reached the microphone. “To hell with dreams. I’m done with it because this is true.”

Backstage, Emma Stone said she was holding her winning envelope at the time. “I think everyone’s in a state of confusion still,” she said.

Later Stone, who pledged her deep love of Moonlight, said, “Is that the craziest Oscar moment of all time? Cool.”

It was, nevertheless, a shocking upset considering that La La Land had 14 nominations, a record that tied it with Titanic and All About Eve.

Barry Jenkins’ tender coming-of-age drama Moonlight, made for just $1.5 million, is an unusually small Oscar winner.

Having made just over $22 million at the box office, it’s one of the lowest grossing winners, but one of the most critically adored.