LOS ANGELES // The Oscars, famously, are attended by people who would go to the opening of an envelope. This year the organisers couldn’t even get that right.
Hollywood legends Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced that the favourite La La Land had won the award for best picture, only to perform a swift U-turn when it emerged that Beatty had been handed the wrong envelope.
Amid chaos on the stage of the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, Beatty explained that the actual winner was the African-American coming-of-age drama Moonlight.
PricewaterhouseCoopers, the professional services company that has counted Oscar votes and sealed the award envelopes for 82 years, apologised. “We are currently investigating how this could have happened, and deeply regret that this occurred,” the company said on Monday.
"Is that the craziest Oscar moment of all time?" said Emma Stone, who won the best actress award for her role in La La Land, and whose duplicate award envelope had been mistakenly handed to Beatty.
In other awards at Sunday night's ceremony, Mahershala Ali became the first Muslim to win an Oscar, with an award for best supporting actor for his role in Moonlight. He received a standing ovation.
And The White Helmets, a Netflix film about the rescuers who risk their lives to save civilians caught in Syria's civil war, won the Oscar for best documentary short.
Khaled Khateeb, 21, a volunteer with the group and the cinematographer who shot most of the footage, was banned by US Homeland Security from travelling from Turkey to Los Angeles for the ceremony.
“I tried and it didn’t work,” he said on Monday. “It is America’s loss.”
Instead Khaled stayed up all night in Istanbul smoking shisha with friends and watching the ceremony.
“It is a media prize, it’s not a political prize,” he said. “But still it sheds light on the tragedy of the Syrian people. Maybe it will help stop some of the massacres. It is a strong movie.”
The film captures the volunteers as they race to rescue people from the rubble of air strikes, knowing that they themselves could be bombed in a “double tap” attack.
Many of the group’s members have been killed by Russian and Assad regime air strikes, and they were among the last rescuers working in eastern Aleppo when it fell to regime forces in December after one of the most devastating battles of the war. The group was also nominated for last year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
The film’s director Orlando von Einsiedel and producer Joanna Natasegara accepted the Oscar, but devoted most of their short time on stage to sharing a statement from Khaled.
“We’re so grateful that this film has highlighted our work to the world,” it said.
Khaled invited “anyone here who hears me to stop the bloodshed in Syria and around the world”, and to “show that we all care that this war ends as quickly as possible”.
* Reuters and Associated Press
