It's the Paper, Silly!

It’s the Paper, Silly!

By Bob Travica

The Oscar folks screwed it royally at the awards ceremony on February 26, 2017. It was announced first that the film La, La Land was the best picture (the most prestigious of all Oscars), only to shuffle the award to the movie Moonlight minutes later. The announcer Warren Beatty hesitated when he opened the envelope with the card supposedly naming the winner, and stared at his partner Faye Dunaway. She grabbed the envelope from his hand and read: “La, La Land!” The movie’s producers came to the stage, began thank-you speeches, and then suddenly a chaos descended onto the stage. New faces, lots of commotion, a theater play in which all the actors forgot the script.

Finally, a shocking announcement by the producers of La, La Land made the cut: Moonlight has won, we lost. Warren Beatty showed another card naming Moonlight as the winner and explained that he was confused reading “Emma Stone, La, La Land,” so he hesitated in his first announcement. (Mrs. Stone had already taken her Oscar for the best actress earlier that night.)

Everybody was confused not the least the people onstage. Although Warren and Faye were invited as announcers in honor of the 50^th anniversary of their cult movie Bonnie and Clyde, everybody sensed that the happening was not some stunt they pulled off. Nor was it a trick of host Jimmy Kimmel who looked as lost as anybody else, after clowning around with politics and other stuff the whole night. And the renegades Bonnie and Clyde were shot mortally again, this time on a big hall stage. But the killer was a part of the mystery. Even with Oscar's placing in the right hands, nobody still had a clue of how come all the mess happened. 

In the analysis that followed, it was established that a representative of PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) handed in a wrong envelope to Warren. PwC (or the companies making it today) has been tallying votes, printing Oscar cards, and handling the award procedure for over 80 years. The problematic envelope was one of two envelopes made for announcing Oscar winners. In general, the announcement procedure involves one PwC rep on each side of the stage tasked with passing an envelope to an announcer, as it is uncertain which side the announcer will come from. The rep that handed in the backup envelope for the best actress was lost in his tweeting at a critical moment when Warren and Faye entered from his side, and the blunder unfolded. He passed the envelope for the already announced Oscar referring to La, La Land.

PwC has claimed that their Oscar procedures are fault-free and that each detail was thought out to perfection. Well, maybe so, but for the human factor and the inherent risk of drawing again an already “spent” (backup) envelope. But my real concern is with maintaining a paper trail that spans decades. Would it not be safer to keep the list of Oscar winners electronically and to render it from a computer to a teleprompter and a big screen, according to the ceremony protocol? The announcers could still be there, albeit relieved from opening envelopes. Once a winner name appears on their teleprompter, they can read it and then it would appear on the big screen. Wouldn’t such a procedure be overall better? Isn’t it the paper, silly, that eventually exploded into the PwC face?

If security is a reason for not moving to the e-trail, that cannot be a serious argument because there is a plenty of means of ensuring the security of this procedure. Is it the tradition, perhaps? If so, what justifies sticking to it when it is apparently prone to errors? If it is about a traditional imagery of paper cards and envelopes, the big screen can show an envelope being in the process of opening, and a paper card popping out of it. This is Hollywood, isn’t it? Filming a tradition could be done in a zillion of creative ways. At any rate, what does the sticking to the paper trail in this electronic era speak of a technological vision of the implicated accounting and consulting firm?