This year's Oscars contained a lot of weird stuff, including random tourists arriving at the show and mistakes in who won awards. One of the oddest may have been the way Nicole Kidman celebrated winners. She had this utterly bizarre way of clapping where she slapped her palms together without letting her fingers touch. Take a look if you don't recall.
It turns out that there's a reason that Nicole Kidman had to clap like that. Her Oscar attire for the evening included 119 karats of jewelry, among them a very large, and one assume very expensive, pear shaped ring. Kidman told radio show Kyle and Jackie O (via ET online) that she was so worried about damaging it that she was afraid to clap at all, but realizing that not doing so would look really bad, she compromised with the odd seal clap. It was truly an odd thing to see, though the explanation certain makes more sense.
When celebrities go to the Oscars, their attire is usually provided for them by a top designer who wants to have their work shown off. Usually, this means that the outfits are returned after the event. It's unlikely that that jeweler Harry Winston was just going to gift 119 karats to Nicole Kidman because she's a nice person. She was going to have to return the ring, so scratching it or otherwise damaging it just wasn't an option. She would have had to pay for it if that had happened. We're not saying she can't afford it, but we're guessing she really would rather have not paid for it.
Honestly, the amount of money that actresses wear in jewelry at events like this are so valuable that it's it's surprising that any of them move about freely. At some point somebody has lost an earring, right? It has to have happened. Even if it didn't happen, wouldn't the fear of it happening prevent anybody from being comfortable all night?
Of course, Nicole Kidman's clapping was one of those things that, on any other night, could have been the meme joke everybody was talking about the next day. Instead, it was more than a little overshadowed by the fact that nobody knew what the hell the Best Picture was. Warren Beaty announced La La Land as the winner, only later to discover he had the wrong envelope in his hand, and that Moonlight was actually the winner.
We're assuming that next year the Academy Awards will take some added precautions to make sure that won't happen again. We're also guessing that Nicole Kidman will consider her Oscar outfit a little more closely next time and maybe forego the giant jewels on her hands.
