How are the Oscars preventing another “Moonlight” debacle this year? As the show has rolled on, we’ve gotten a peek at the envelopes distributed to each of the presenters. Each one is very clearly labeled in massive text. Hopefully no one will be confused as to which envelope they’ve been handed.
You can compare how large the text is in the image above with last year’s envelopes, and the difference is huge — literally. The text should be big enough that even Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway can read it without any difficulty.
This is just one of several measures the Academy has taken to prevent another mistake. As you’ll recall, Beatty and Dunaway incorrectly announced “La La Land” as the Best Picture at the end of the 2017 awards show. The producers of “La La Land” had to hand over the Best Picture Oscar to the team behind “Moonlight” — the film that truly won Best Picture.
They misunderstood it to mean “La La Land” had won. But it was unclear why they would have been given the wrong envelope — until it came to light that the chaos stemmed from a rep for the Oscars’ accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Among the other measures taken, The PwC accountants have also committed all the nominees to memory, and they’ll be positioned to immediately inform the producers in the event that someone still can’t read the text on the envelope. This time it should say in big letters — BEST PICTURE.