Oscar Fiasco

Well! Everyone will have seen the debacle at the recent Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles. What a fiasco! The Best Picture is ….. “La La Land!” “Oh No It Isn’t!” “It’s ‘Moonlight’!”

Finally they have found out what the cause of the mistake was – it was PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Brian Cullinan, with his colleague Martha Ruiz, who have taken the blame for the wrong envelope being given to Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. They have now been banned from the Oscars ceremony for life. Some might think that this is a blessing in disguise for them ….

Martha L. Ruiz and Brian Cullinan

Photograph via Associated Press

But go back to when it first happened, live on stage, on worldwide TV. There was a long look of confusion on Warren’s face and he took a long time before Faye blurted out the “Winner’s” name, without obviously having read the small print. The first thing many of us sitting at home will have said is “He’s losing it!” or “I think he’s getting a bit old for this”, and similar. Of course he wasn’t, but it took some time and a lot of explanation to confirm that this was the case. In fact many of us on this side of The Pond will have gone to bed convinced that it was the fault of those two old so-and-so’s on stage, who the Academy was stupid enough to ask to hand out the most important Oscar, given their ages added together come to 155 years in total. It is a very, very long time since the two of them were shooting their way through a load of banks as Bonnie and Clyde.

Yet our prejudices were wrong! It was not their fault. It was the fault of a couple of ….. accountants! And (comparatively) young accountants by the look of the photos of the two of them. My guess is that neither of them is a member of Generation Boomer, although Brian will have probably aged considerably in the last few days. Apparently, according to reports, Brian was tweeting just when he was about to hand over the envelope concerned, and this is probably how he got distracted and handed over the wrong one. I wasn’t there and so I cannot comment, but I ask you all the following question: Would there have been such a mix up if the people responsible for the envelopes were Generation Boomers? “Obviously not!” I hear you cry. Because we are a generation that took pride in doing things properly: our motto is “If a job’s worth doing then it’s worth doing well!” And besides the vast majority wouldn’t have the faintest idea about how to send a tweet ……