In case you’ve been living under a rock, the Oscars were rocked by an epic mistake on Sunday night: La La Land was incorrectly named Best Picture when Moonlight was really the winner.
Nearly 24 hours after the snafu, Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel broke his silence on the shocking moment with a few words on his show, Jimmy Kimmel Live.
“I don’t know if you know this but I hosted the Oscars last night,” Kimmel quipped, opening his ABC show.
“Except for the end, it was a lot of fun.”
“It went very well. We were chugging along, and then, all of a sudden out of nowhere, it turned into a Maury Povich paternity test show. It was the weirdest TV finale since Lost,” Kimmel said. “I’m sure you’ve at least heard, La La Land was simultaneously the biggest winner and loser last night… You know it’s a strange night when the word ‘envelope’ is trending on Twitter.”
During his funny monologue, Kimmel also explained how the show was supposed to end: the plan was for him to finish the show from the audience, sitting next to Matt Damon.
“The plan is for me to end the show from the audience next to Matt Damon, who, make no mistake, whatever confusion there was about who won, Matt Damon lost. He was a loser. He is a loser,” Kimmel joked.
“But we’re sitting there and we notice some commotion going on and Matt says, ‘I think I heard the stage manager say they got the winner wrong,’ which is unusual, but you figure, well, the host will go onstage and clear this up. And then I remember, ‘Oh I’m the host!'”
Last night, in the final moments of the Academy Awards ceremony, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway presented the last award, but they were incorrectly given the best actress award envelope.
Beatty, who was clearly confused and knew something was wrong, saw Emma Stone’s name and “La La Land” on the card, and then handed the envelope to Dunaway, who incorrectly announced the musical as the Best Picture winner.
It wasn’t until a few minutes later — after La La Land producers had given their acceptance speeches — that word of the monumental mix-up got to the stage, prompting the cast and crew of Moonlight to head to the podium to accept the biggest prize of the night.
During the fiasco, Kimmel came up to the stage and jokingly took responsibility, quipping, “I knew I would screw this show up.”
The first-time Oscars host looked shaken and upset, as did the rest of the A-list audience, but nonetheless, Kimmel was well-reviewed for putting on an entertaining show with creative bits and a spot-on monologue.
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Today, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the company that handles the Oscar envelopes, took responsibility for the history-making fail, stating that the Best Picture envelope was pulled from the wrong pile. (There are two envelopes for each category.)
A partner from PwC said, “We clearly made a mistake and once the mistake was made we corrected it and owned up to it.”
The Academy apologized to the La La Land and Moonlight filmmakers.