Dunaway and Beatty get an Oscar award do-over
After participating in last-year's historic screwup in announcing the best picture at the Oscars, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway reportedly will be back at the awards ceremony Sunday to announce the winner in the same category. TMZ reports that the Academy believes that the best way to right the wrong of last year's globally televised disaster is to bring back two of the people involved to try it again. That's why the two movie legends were at the Dolby Theatre this week to quickly rehearse the big moment, TMZ said. They went through their lines twice, TMZ reported, with Dunaway saying, “Presenting is better the.second time around,” with Beatty following up with, “The winner is ‘Gone with the Wind.'” Last year, Beatty handed his “Bonnie and Clyde” co-star the envelope to read that the winner was … “La La Land.” Of course, we all know that Beatty handed Dunaway the wrong envelope because the real winner was “Moonlight.” But no one corrected the mistake right away, and the crew from “La La Land” came on stage to accept the award. With speeches underway, a flurry of activity broke out on stage, and “La La Land” star Emma Stone could be seen mouthing the words “Oh, my God.” Finally, producer Jordan Horowitz had the wherewithal to step forward and say, “Guys, guys, I'm sorry. No. There's a mistake. … ‘Moonlight,' you guys won best picture. This is not a joke.” While blame for the fiasco was traded around for a bit — drawing in host Jimmy Kimmel — the fault ultimately lay with an accountant for PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), who had handed Beatty and Dunaway the wrong envelope. The accountant Brian Cullinan had been tweeting backstage photos of stars instead of properly overseeing the meticulous procedure for handing out the envelopes. That Beatty and Dunaway will return sort of makes sense given that the Academy last year announced that it was again going to trust PwC to handle security for the counting of the Oscar ballots. PwC has handled Oscar ballot tabulations for more than 80 years. The Academy also asked Kimmel to return to host. Meanwhile, for their return, Beatty and Dunaway agreed to rehearse together instead of using up the rehearsal time to argue over who would get to announce the winner, which apparently happened last year, TMZ reported.