You have to feel bad for the presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway — it wasn’t their fault that they were handed the wrong envelope (that of the winner of the Best Actress). In fact, only two people actually know the names of the Oscar winners, before the envelopes are opened and read — two accountants from PricewaterhouseCoopers, that tabulates the votes!
Also, you have to feel worse for the La La Land team that had to hide their disappointment and be gracious enough to themselves make the announcement that they were wrongly called upon the stage — instead of Moonlight, which was the real winner for Best Picture.
But what puzzles us is why it took so long for the organisers to take note of the goof-up — the La La Land team were on the verge of finishing their acceptance speeches on stage! Cringe.
“This only proves that yanaikkum adisarukkum (even an elephant can slip). Normally the Oscars give us something to talk about — but this year there’s total drama!” chuckles prominent television anchor Bhavana Balakrishnan. She goes on to say, “But audiences should let it go — mistakes like these can happen.
Speaking as an anchor myself, generally we are the people who are the face of a show — that can be both a pro and a con. Even I have had a few experiences like this — once I was about to announce the winner during a popular show and to increase anticipation, I just said the first and the last letter of the person’s name for the audience to guess it — but the organiser quickly realised that I was given the wrong name! When I was alerted about this, I initially froze. But then I gained my composure and went, ‘I’m generally poor at the English alphabet!’ to salvage the situation.”
On the other hand, Saravanan Rangaraj, a popular TV producer opines, “These days, organisers do negative publicity — and I don’t think this damages their reputation. Even when we do small scale reality shows, we make sure that everything is done in the right way — and if some mishap happens, the anchor is quickly notified and the correction is made almost in that instant. Only this makes it suspicious — why did it take so long for them to make this correction? Either it was staged or the organisers and the presenter might have known it only at the very last minute. Anyway, everyone is only talking about the Oscars now... so aim achieved, I guess!”
