It appears that Warren Beatty was handed the wrong envelope before he walked on stage with Faye Dunaway to announce the Best Picture winner at the 2017 Academy Awards held at the Dolby Theatre on Sunday (February 26) in Hollywood.
This lead to what has to be the most confusing moment in Oscar history: The wrong movie being called as the winner.
Many people are wondering why there is more than one envelope for each category.
Here is the reason:
There is a company called PwC in charge of protecting the envelopes and ensuring that the right envelopes get delivered to the right people.
“From a security perspective, we double up everything,” Brian Cullinan of PricewaterhouseCoopersexplained. “That’s why there’s two of us. We have two briefcases, that are identical, and we have two entire sets of winning envelopes. Martha [L. Ruiz] carries one of those briefcases, I carry the other.”
He continued, “We go to the show separately with police escorts. I used to think it was for our security, it’s really for the briefcase [laughs]. We take different routes to get there just because of the kinds of things that can happen in L.A. traffic. We want to make sure that no matter what happens, one of us gets there. We’ve never really had a problem with that.”
That explains the existence of two envelopes. How the wrong envelope ended up in Warren‘s hand is still a mystery.