CMU School of Drama


Tuesday, February 28, 2017

PricewaterhouseCoopers on Oscar flub: 'We made a human error'

www.usatoday.com: The accountants did it?

We all watched in shock as it happened. Now we know exactly what happened.

PricewaterhouseCoopers, which has handled the accounting for the Academy Awards since 1934, early Monday apologized for giving the wrong envelope to presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway before the two actors erroneously announced La La Land as best picture at Sunday night's Oscars. In actuality, Moonlight won the top prize.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

The Oscar’s “La La Land” mistake was truly a regrettable one – it not only dominated the media after the awards ceremony – it caused a lot of great Oscar’s moments to obtain almost no coverage. Earlier, I read a separate article about this same mishap; but, that article took on a different approach. The other article tried to take all attention away from the Academy and did its best to throw most of the blame on to PwC. In contrast, this USA Today article attempts briefly to defend PwC by quoting Anthony Sabino, the law professor who believes that this mishap will heal like a black eye does. While I hope that PwC does not suffer too badly from this mistake (though I’m sure the accountants who caused the issue and did not address it have already had their fair share of notoriety), it is a very human trait to remember the mistakes that people/companies make much more clearly and fully than the successes.

Alexa James-Cardenas said...

Ok… So what I wasn’t going to write on the Oscar Best Picture mistake, but I’m getting annoyed (admittedly I’m a little revived up by the Suicide Squad- There is the injustice of the night), but I honestly don’t think it should be this talked about, and the media is not helping to heal the little scratch the mistake made. I totally agree with Angel, by make this one thing a big deal, it takes away from the other achievements and mishaps of the night. But this “Big-Deal story” truly shows how humans love to take things to the extreme and always try to put the blame on someone or something. Yes, it was bad that the makers and cast of La La Land were given false information and thus feeling deceived, but really, as long as the Oscars is being by people, HUMAN BEINGS, which we can all agree are flawed in one sense or another, the probability of a mistake happened, although kept at a low, is still a possibility. So instead of making the wound better, people need to GET OVER IT, and I realize, in a relative sense, there are things a lot more important in the world.