And the award for biggest gaffe goes to … a red-faced Oscars
‘Moonlight’ wins best picture after envelope flub
In a plot twist that would make any Hollywood screenwriter envious, viewers of the Academy Awards last night had the red carpet pulled out from under them when a best picture win for “La La Land” turned out to be a gaffe — “Moonlight,” in fact, was the winner.
Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, presenting the night’s final award, originally told audiences that “La La Land,” the awards front-runner throughout the evening, nabbed the coveted prize, only to later reveal that he had been handed the wrong envelope.
When Beatty opened the first slip, he paused and studied it because it was in fact the envelope for Emma Stone, who had won best actress for “La La Land” earlier in the evening. He offered the card to “Bonnie and Clyde” co-star Dunaway, who announced the false news.
The realization came only after the audience
heard emotional acceptance speeches from the producers of the Damien Chazelle-directed film about jazz and Hollywood — Chazelle became the youngest person to win a best director award that night.
“I wasn’t trying to be funny,” said Beatty, after the producers of “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins’ drama starring Mahershala Ali and Janelle Monáe, shuffled incredulously onstage.
It was perhaps one of the biggest flubs in Oscars history, a truly unexpected closing moment for a ceremony that was supposed to be about how artists respond to politics but was ultimately defined by a single red envelope.
Balancing act
Much of the evening, after all, was positioned to be a statement on artists’ importance during politically charged times. A standing ovation for Meryl Streep. Blue ACLU ribbons on the red carpet. Talk of immigration, fake news and the Twitter habits of President Donald Trump. The big news coming from the Academy Awards on Sunday night would have been not who won or lost but how Hollywood reacted to, and often stood against, the Trump administration during the annual ceremony.
The optics of a movie, sometimes criticized for being a jazz film starring white people, being upstaged by a portrait of the African-American experience wasn’t without irony. After last year’s self-critical, #OscarsSoWhite-dominated event, the Oscars this year aimed to point its criticisms outward, making the case that, during times of political and racial division, artists are on the right side of history.
In a plea to “make America great again,” host Jimmy Kimmel asked viewers to reach out to someone they disagreed with and build a relationship with them. The late-night TV host played a difficult balancing act, juggling political commentary and jokes about the movie industry.
“I want to say thank you to President Trump,” Kimmel said during his opening monologue. “I mean, remember last year when it seemed like the Oscars were racist? It’s gone.”
“All you people out there who feel like there’s no mirror for you, that your life is not reflected, the academy has your back, the ACLU has your back, we have your back and over the next four years we will not leave you alone,” Jenkins said after winning best adapted screenplay. “We will not forget you.”
Denouncing Trump
But perhaps the ceremony’s harshest indictment of Trump came from someone who wasn’t there. Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, who won an award for best foreign language film, boycotted the event as a protest to Trump’s travel ban.
“My absence is out of respect for the people of my country and those of the other six nations whom have been disrespected by the inhumane law that bans entry of immigrants to the U.S.,” he wrote in a statement, which was read out loud in lieu of a thank you speech. “Dividing the world into the us and our enemies categories creates fear, a deceitful justification for aggression and war.”
In fact, some of the harshest criticisms of the Trump administration came not from American artists but the people directly affected by Trump’s policies — non-citizens.
Directors from the entire Foreign Language category denounced, in an open letter, the “fanaticism and nationalism we see today in the US and other countries.” Alessandro Bertolazzi, the Italian makeup artist for “Suicide Squad,” which won the makeup category, said during his acceptance speech that “this is for all the immigrants.”
Kimmel chose a more lighthearted approach to commentary.
“This is being watched live by millions of people in 225 countries that now hate us,” he said.
In the end, the host’s humor wasn’t a punctuation point on politics, but the levity defusing a gaffe unseen in the Oscars’ 89 years. “I knew I would screw this show up. I really did,” he said as the telecast ended.