Warren Beatty must be tired of being asked how the premature announcement of La La Land as Best Picture could have ever happened. With almost two months passing since that infamous Hollywood night, you'd think Beatty would be done with having to explain how that night went down. Apparently not, as a recent television appearance found the writer/director explaining, in great detail, how it all happened. Watch for yourself, below.
As per usual, Warren Beatty explained the 2017 Academy Awards gaffe as follows: he thought the envelope was a misprint, and seeing as he didn't want to hold up the night's finale, he handed off the envelope to Faye Dunaway, as instructed. The rest, as they say, is television history, and ultimately Beatty's story hasn't changed. Though, to be fair, the question did lead to a fun moment between host Graham Norton and his guest, as Norton asked if the moment was all anyone talked about that night, to which Beatty basically said that Hollywood went back to talking about itself that night.
But as his appearance on The Graham Norton Show displays, the stereotypically presumed ego of Hollywood can be overcome by a sensational news item. After all, it isn't like the Academy Award goof was gone and forgotten the day after. Countless memes and gags recounted La La Land and Moonlight's pas de deux of reversing fortunes, one of the best being a theater teasing its patrons with a "mistaken" screening of the former when they had paid for the latter. So clearly the moment hasn't lost its luster, and one would expect that as long as Oscar night 2017 replays in people's minds, Warren Beatty will be there to help set the record straight as many times as it takes.
If there are three things everyone is going to remember after this year's Oscars, it's Moonlight, La La Land and Warren Beatty. That's not to say that the legendary actor will live in infamy, but rather that he had a front row seat beside Faye Dunaway to witness the biggest Oscar flub ever. If anything, a story such as this would serve as a great opening to a hypothetical autobiography written by the man himself. Though in the end, Beatty should take comfort in one, universally believed fact: at least he wasn't the accountant who was in charge of the envelopes when it happened.
Moonlight is currently available on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital HD; while La La Land is currently on Digital HD, with the Blu-ray and DVD release occurring on April 25. Or was that the other way around?
