Oscars

[Bonnie and Clyde trailer voice]: They’re old, they kind of hate each other, and they read envelopes. Since Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway mistakenly announced La La Land as the recipient of the Academy Award for Best Picture on Sunday night, everyone‘s been looking for an answer as to how such a massive goof could come to pass. Blame has been passed around like a hot potato, with fault assigned to Beatty, Dunaway, some tweeting nitwit from the accounting firm that tabulates the votes, the person who lays down the envelopes, and just for good measure, a cold and uncaring god. But now the trenchant, Spotlightesque journalists at TMZ claim to have the full story behind just what went down.

In the latest development in envelopegate, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has finally issued an apology. But before we get there, lets do a quick recap.

It was the Best Picture Winner announcement heard ’round the world; for just a brief, hilariously awkward moment in time, when La La Land was erroneously declared the big winner of Oscar night 2017, we forgot all about our current political turmoil and embraced the total madness of Envelopegate. How could such a ridiculous mixup happen? The explanation for the confusion is fairly simple, but, in a twist befitting the ongoing insanity of this whole debacle, the dependable accountants of PricewaterhouseCoopers may have predicted their own error just days before the awards. The plot thickens.

The big headline from last night was Warren Beatty’s colossal goof during the Best Picture announcement, in which he erroneously named La La Land the winner of the coveted prize, only to be corrected not a minute later with the news that the award would actually go to Moonlight. It was a classic mix-up, a reminder of the high-wire instability of live television, and an instant entry for the Oscar history books. But there was a second, less glaring gaffe in the telecast, so subtle that it went by without most viewers noticing. But the Australian producer who watched herself declared dead in the In Memoriam segment certainly did.

What would an Oscars hosted by Jimmy Kimmel be without a new edition of Mean Tweets?

In what is no doubt the most insane moment in Oscars history, Moonlight won Best Picture only after it was wrongly announced that La La Land was the winner.

Emma Stone is now an Academy Award winner. The actress won her first Oscar for La La Land, beating out Meryl Streep and Isabelle Huppert (pretty much the French Meryl Streep) for Best Actress.

It’s been tight race between Casey Affleck and Denzel Washington throughout awards season, but on Sunday night the Academy deemed the Manchester By the Sea star this year’s Best Actor winner.

Whether you love it, hate it, or are maintaining a neutral stance on the La La Land culture war, you’ve got to admit Damien Chazelle pulled off something pretty fantastic with his modern day ode to classic musicals. From the choreography to the film’s stunning color palette, it’s hard to deny that the filmmaker crafted one beautiful movie. With that in mind, plus the Academy’s penchant for honoring movies about Hollywood, it makes sense that Chazelle won the Oscar for Best Director on Sunday night.

Believe it or not, Viola Davis just won her first Academy Award. The fact that Davis won for her tour-de-force performance in Fences is far from surprising, but the fact that it took Academy voters this long — the woman’s been working for 21 years and has been nominated three times — to give her the award that’s long had her name on it is pretty shocking.

Mahershala Ali has been swooping up accolades and nominations for months now, all leading up to his big win on Oscar night. On Sunday the Moonlight actor took home the prize for Best Supporting Actor for his role as drug dealer Juan.

Last month, it was revealed that Academy Award-nominated director Asghar Farhadi would probably not be able to attend this year’s ceremony due to President Donald Trump’s travel ban. After careful consideration, Farhadi decided to skip the Oscars regardless of the circumstances, noting that any possible exception made for him would be accompanied by “ifs and buts which are in no way acceptable.” While people quickly arranged protest screenings of Farhadi’s The Salesman around the country, his circumstances served as a frightening preview of how even prominent artists from around the world could be treated until the new immigration guidelines.