Oscars

The Oscars Have an Intense, Six-Step Plan to Avoid Another Envelope Disaster

The ceremony may be a little less fun backstage this year.
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Courtesy of Kevin Winter/Getty Images

It’s a moment that last year’s Oscar attendees still shudder about. The wrong envelope found its way into Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty’s hands; La La Land was declared the best picture of 2016; and then, moments later, Moonlight was announced as the true winner—resulting in confusion, apologies, conspiracy theories, and a schism in the 83-year partnership between the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. This year, PwC is determined to win back its reputation with a number of new envelope-handling rules that will ensure the tension backstage at this year’s Academy Awards will be dialed up to 11.

Brian Cullinan and Martha Ruiz, the two PwC partners responsible for both mishandling the envelope and failing to correct the error in a timely fashion, have not been invited back to the Oscars, though they didn’t lose their day jobs at PwC. Rick Rosas, who previously handled envelope duty at the Oscars for 14 years, will be back on the beat this year. Additionally, PwC’s U.S. chairman and senior partner, Tim Ryan, will himself be overseeing the process. Last year, it was Ryan who made sure PwC took full responsibility for the envelope error.

In addition to banning Cullinan and Ruiz, PwC has banned the use of phones or social media backstage during the show. Last year, Cullinan posted a backstage photo he had taken of winner Emma Stone to his personal Twitter account during the ceremony, just moments before handing off the wrong envelope. After the mix-up, Cullinan quickly deleted all of his tweets, but not fast enough. There will be no tweeting, texting, or gramming to distract PwC employees this year.

There are usually only two PwC partners backstage—one on each wing. But this year, a third partner will sit in the show’s control room with the producers. All three partners will have a complete set of envelopes, as well as the full list of winners committed to memory. Imagine the furious memorization cramming sessions at PwC headquarters on Oscars weekend.

All three partners will also attend rehearsals, and will be practicing how to respond in case there is another snafu. “As you’re well aware,” Ryan told the Associated Press, “it took a long time to respond last year when there was a mistake that we made. So, we’re formally practicing the what-ifs.”

The most potentially tension-producing new procedure, however, will involve not only the PwC employees, but also the celebrity presenters backstage. The confusion last year was a result of Dunaway and Beatty announcing from a duplicate best-actress envelope that read “Emma Stone, La La Land” instead of a best-picture envelope that read “Moonlight.” As each envelope is handed off this year, both the presenters and a stage manager will confirm that it’s actually the one that corresponds to the category they are about to present.

That intense focus on handing off envelopes may mean that there is less of a celebratory, loose environment backstage at the 2018 Academy Awards. In other words, we may miss out on some of the ceremony’s more spontaneous moments—like Emma Stone breaking down in the arms of her friend and fellow Oscar winner Brie Larson after she won last year. Then again, it’s a big backstage—there may be room for intense attention to envelope details and mushy emotional reactions.

“My nature, just as a person, is healthy paranoia,” Ryan concluded in his A.P. interview. “But I also know in my head that we haven’t left any step undone. We owe that to the Academy. While I feel very, very good about all the work that’s been done and the attention to detail that’s in place, our job doesn’t end until that curtain closes.”