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Twitter Reacts to the Bizarre Twist in Last Night's Oscar Ceremony

By Dustin Rowles | Social Media | February 27, 2017 |

By Dustin Rowles | Social Media | February 27, 2017 |

If you’re just catching up to it this morning, La La Land was mistakenly announced the Best Picture winner at the Academy Awards last night, but as the producers of La La Land were giving their speeches, a stagehand realized a mistake had been made. Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty had announced the wrong film; in fact, Moonlight was the winner. Here’s video footage of the moment:

The world reacted with confusion and glee and anger and laughter. For an Oscar ceremony that felt more bloated than usual in the middle, it was a terrific twist ending that left dozens of media outlets pulling their tweets and issuing corrections.

Here’s exactly what happened. During the announcement, Warren Beatty was given the wrong card. He was given the card for Emma Stone’s Best Actress win, and he looked confused as he was trying to announce the winner. He looked at his co-announcer, Faye Dunaway, and he looked to the audience, before Dunaway simply read the name of the movie on the card, La La Land.

Some people, including Emma Stone, didn’t originally believe that excuse, as she explained backstage while praising the hell out of Moonlight.

Meanwhile, Ryan Gosling’s onstage reaction to the whole thing was absolutely priceless.

There was initially some suggestion on Twitter of foul play because it was apparent, but it was all an innocent mistake.

There are TWO cards for every winner, and the stage hand had merely accidentally given Beatty and Dunaway the duplicate card for the Best Actress winner.


For a few minutes, Twitter blamed Warren Beatty (instead of Dunaway, who read the wrong card).

But it wasn’t Beatty’s fault.

It wasn’t Matt Damon’s fault, either.

It might have been M. Night Shyamalan’s fault.

The real hero of the whole ordeal — besides Barry Jenkins, the rightful winner of Best Picture — was Jordan Horowitz, the La La Land producer who stopped everything to hand the award to Moonlight.

It was, in a weird way, a redeeming moment for La La Land, which had been suffering from month-long backlash. When it was announced as winner, there was a collective sigh of exasperation heard around social media, but this? This put La La Land back in our good graces, while Moonlight still got its deserved Best Picture title.

The entire ordeal couldn’t escape without one goat, however. That was the white dude from La La Land who continued to deliver his speech even after he knew that he’s lost.

But, all’s well that ends well.




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Dustin is the founder and co-owner of Pajiba. You may email him here, follow him on Twitter, or listen to his weekly TV podcast, Podjiba.