awardalysis

[kalimac]

As a former awards administrator for two literary societies, I continue to be fascinated by the Oscars snafu this year. There are two outstanding questions in my mind: 1) how and why was Warren Beatty handed the wrong envelope?; 2) why did it take so long for the PwC awards administrators, who have memorized all the winners precisely to prevent

Comments

[gerisullivan]

This graphic designer agrees with your analysis. Another picture I saw showed the outside of the envelope shows the award title in an fairly small, low-contrast, all caps font -- it's elegant...and remarkably hard-to-read. I also note that the presenters don't typically look at the front of the envelope -- they're focused on opening it and withdrawing the card with the winning name(s).

Curiously enough, this article says they changed the design this year and shows how much larger the envelope labels were in previous years. (Sorry, you'll likely have to click ads shut to see the full image on most of the photographic examples.

[kalimac]

As you note, the presenters aren't checking the outside of the envelopes. (Why should they? What they have to announce is what's inside.) I have read that screencaps can show that "Best Actress" is visible on the envelope as Beatty is carrying it out, but nothing I've seen is high-enough resolution to reveal that.

If the bad design of the envelopes did contribute to the error, then it surely was - as the article you link to suggests - because it was difficult for the PwC people backstage to see which envelope they had, rather than with directly confusing the presenters. My suggestion, of course, is that if Beatty (or Dunaway) could have seen "Best Actress" on the card, he'd have realized what the problem was, and the same applies if he'd seen it on the envelope.

[gerisullivan]

Agreed.

As you pointed out, the teeny italics on the bottom of the interior card are all but useless as any sort of confirmation check for the presenters.

In my less than humble opinion, they'd also be safer using upper and lower case letters rather than all caps throughout.

[kalimac]

Here's someone else making the same point about the interior design of the cards, in more detail.

Interestingly, I found this article linked to by Mark Evanier, who'd received the link from Neil Gaiman.

[kevin_standlee]

The reforms started under you and Seth (and nominally me, but you two did the work) have made the Hugo Awards a lot less susceptible this sort of error. Now you can't easily prevent the tech errors like the flashing of Cheryl Morgan's name up before the presenter read her name out in Boston, but everything under the Administrator's control is much better now for the Hugos than it was a generation ago. Also, as I recall, we typically have an on-stage escort who delivers the actual cards, so we don't need the duplicate cards that the Oscars used.

[anonymous]

How was Beatty handed the wrong envelope? Apparently a Huffington Post story a few days before the ceremony hinted as to how it could happen: one PWC representative is positioned stage right and the other is stage left, and both of them have a full set of all 24 award envelopes. And then Beatty and Dunaway apparently entered from the opposite side of the previous presenter, Leonardo DiCaprio, who had announced the Best Actress. But I haven't read what caused the PWC staffer on their side to hand them the wrong card, although I did just hear one report that, because Dunaway was having trouble navigating stairs, their entrance was changed late from one side to the other

[kalimac]

That there were two sets of envelopes explains Emma Stone's objection that she still had her own card, so Warren Beatty couldn't have had it. He had the other one.

But it doesn't explain why he was given the wrong one. The answer to that seems to lie in a combination of poor labeling of the outside of the envelope, and of the PwC guy being distracted because he was too busy tweeting backstage photos. If the latter was responsible, then he should be sentenced to four years of scrubbing toilets, or possibly working in Trump's Treasury Department.

[sovay]

However, as the correct card was held up, proving that what Horowitz said was true, I could easily see what had confused Beatty and Dunaway: bad award card design.

Thank you for this analysis; I am both enjoying it and finding it illuminating.