THE Academy Award just did a Miss Universe 2015: It announced the wrong winner.
Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway presented the Best Picture award in light of the 50th anniversary of their movie Bonnie and Clyde. Beatty took his time reading the card that contained the winner for Best Picture and eventually gave it to Dunaway, who announced: La La Land.
In the middle of a La La Land producer’s speech, it was rectified that Moonlight was actually the Best Picture winner.
Beatty explained that he looked at his envelope and it said: “Emma Stone, La La Land.”
“I knew I would screw this show up… I promise I’ll never come back,” host Jimmy Kimmel joked as he ended the show. He even blamed it on Steve Harvey, who infamously flubbed the Miss Universe announcement in 2015.
The shocked team from Moonlight took the stage but it was clear that the flub was going to be the highlight of the ceremony.
The show started out smoothly with few surprises: Emma Stone won Best Actress for La La Land, Casey Affleck won Best Actor for Manchester by the Sea, Viola Davis won Best Supporting Actress for Fences and Mahershala Ali won Best Supporting Actor for Moonlight.
The man behind La La Land, 32-year-old Damien Chazelle, became the youngest in Oscar history to win the Best Director award.
While his film was stripped of the Best Picture honor, La La Land still went home with six awards, the most from any film. Moonlight only took home three, including Best Adapted Screenplay for director Barry Jenkins.
Before the show gaffe, the 2017 Oscars was all about Matt Damon: Affleck thanked him for giving him the role in Manchester by the Sea and Jimmy Kimmel made fun of him for most of the night.
Affleck was kind of mumbling while he received his award but Davis was the opposite.
Every time Viola Davis receives an award, it’s like she’s back in the How To Get Away with Murder classroom. She’s always passionately teaching: “There’s one place where all the great people with the greatest potential are gathered… and that’s the graveyard. People ask me all the time, ‘What kind of stories do you want to tell, Viola?’”
“And I say, ‘Exhume those bodies. Exhume those stories. Stories of people who dreamed big and never saw those dreams into fruition. People who fell in love and lost. I became an artist and thank God I did because we are the only profession who celebrates what it means to live a life,” Davis continued, while thanking co-star and director Denzel Washington whom she referred to as “My captain, my captain.”
On her win, Stone said: “A moment like this is a huge confluence of luck and opportunity.”
Justin Timberlake opened the show performing his Oscar-nominated Can’t Stop the Feeling from outside the Dolby Theater then danced his way inside. He stopped by Oscar-nominee Ryan Gosling, who started on The Mickey Mouse Club with him.
It was the first time the Oscars started with a musical performance. It usually starts with the host’s monologue or a taped production that features all the nominees for Best Picture in a comedic light.
Speaking about possibly uniting a divided country, Kimmel encouraged everybody to just reach out to someone he or she had a disagreement with and talk. It was the perfect segue for Kimmel to tackle his fake feud with Damon.
“Matt did something unselfish; he could have starred in Manchester By the Sea. He could’ve taken that lead actor part for himself but he didn’t. He gave the role to Casey Affleck, his childhood friend,” Kimmel said.
“He handed what was an Oscar-caliber role to his friend and made a Chinese ponytail instead. The Great Wall lost $80 million. Smooth move, dumb ass,” Kimmel told Damon.
Damon had his revenge later in the show, tripping Kimmel who was introducing the show’s musicians.
As expected, the Oscars hit a political tone.
Best Foreign Language Film went to Iran’s The Salesman. As promised, Asghar Farhadi boycotted the awards ceremony. But a colleague read his statement: “My absence is out of respect for the people of my country and those of other six nations who have been disrespected by the inhuman law that bans entry of immigrants to the US.”
Gael Garcia Bernal, a Mexican and more, also talked about his opposition to President Donald Trump’s wall: “Flesh and blood actors are migrant workers. We travel all over the world. We build families. We construct stories. We build life that cannot be divided. As a Mexican, as a Latin American, as a migrant worker, as a human being, I am against any form of wall that wants to separate us.”
Kimmel also shined the spotlight on Meryl Streep, who made history by receiving her 20th Oscar nomination. Kimmel encouraged the room to give the “overrated” actress loud applause for her “lackluster” career—adjectives Trump used for Streep in a tweet following the actress’s political speech during last month’s Golden Globes.
After two hours of the show and silence from Trump on Twitter, Kimmel live tweeted at him: “Hey, @realDonaldTrump, u up?” and “@realDonaldTrump #MerylSays hi.”
Another light moment was when a group of tourists were ushered into the Dolby Theater. Kimmel explained that the tourists thought they were going to see Oscar dresses, which was sort-of true. They indeed saw Oscar dresses worn by the Oscar-nominated actors—live.
An engaged couple had the time of their life when Washington took an usie with them while pronouncing them husband and wife. Jennifer Aniston gave the couple a pair of shades as a wedding gift.
Aniston was emotional when she introduced the “In Memoriam” segment, citing the latest inclusion of Bill Paxton who died Saturday (see separate story in B6). Sara Bareilles sang during the segment that featured Prince, Gene Wilder and ended with mother-and-daughter tandem Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher who died a day apart late last year.
Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night sidekick Guillermo was in attendance. And as an ode to classic Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host presented a video of celebrities like Robert DeNiro, Emma Stone, Felicity Jones and Ryan Gosling reading mean tweets directed at them.
Kimmel also made it rain candies, cookies and donuts to make sure the audience members didn’t go hungry.