Australian TV producer David Hill says the time it took to fix the Oscars stuff up is the big drama
AN Australian man who has worked on the Oscars broadcast says there is a “huge black mark” on the awards ceremony no one can avoid facing.
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VETERAN Australian TV producer David Hill — the live production specialist who oversaw last year’s Academy Awards telecast — says the “huge black mark” on the Oscars after this year’s monumental Best Picture stuff up was how long it took for the mistake to be rectified.
And crisis PR guru Peter Wilkinson believes it’s a mix-up that Hollywood can’t afford right now.
Hill was watching the ceremony from his Los Angeles home on Sunday with some of his 2016 crew when the epic gaffe went down.
“That’s what I fault the production for doing — not acting immediately that the mistake was seen or heard,” Hill said.
“There were two people on that stage that had to know a mistake had been made — both people working for Pricewaterhouse.
“And for them to take 2 ½ minutes to let people know and then for them to act on that, that was a huge black mark.”
In the 24 hours after the mix-up, PricewaterhouseCoopers issued two apologies for the mix-up and promised to investigate.
Regardless of the outcome, their 83-year tenure as official vote counters is under threat.
Hill continued:“I realised something was wrong when Warren Beatty was obviously in trouble and he didn’t know what to do.”
RELATED: Host Jimmy Kimmel gives his verdict on what went wrong
“You could tell he was looking at the teleprompt for advice. There was a period of about seven seconds.
“And the only possible trouble he could be in was what was written in that card.
“That should have set off an alarm bell.”
In a moment that will go down in Oscars infamy, Beatty then showed the card he was holding to his co-presenter, Faye Dunaway, who happily pronounced: “La La Land!”
The Dolby Theatre erupted into applause, the cast and crew of La La Land made their way to the stage and the musical’s producers began making their breathless thank yous.
The trouble being, Academy members had actually voted Moonlight as their Best Picture.
Two representatives of PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting firm that has handled the Oscar votes for 83 years, stood either side of the stage all night: Martha L. Ruiz and Brian Cullinan. Only they — not the telecast’s producers or anyone else — knew the winners in advance.
And Cullinan had handed Beatty and Dunaway the wrong envelope.
Rather than the Best Picture envelope, he had delivered the presenters the duplicate Best Actress envelope, which read: “Emma Stone, La La Land.”
What Hill can’t get his head around is how long it took for the mix-up to be rectified.
“I ran the tape back and it was about 2 ½ minutes. They should have realised as soon as the announcement was made: ‘Oh my god!’
“What Brian told me when I was doing it last year was that they memorise the winners and they at the last minute put the envelope together.
“So as soon as he heard La La Land, he should have known immediately that there was a mistake and he should have alerted the producers, or especially Gary Natoli the stage manager, to cue Jimmy (Kimmel, host) to go on.
“That’s what I fault the production for doing — not acting immediately that the mistake was seen or heard.
“There were two people on that stage that had to know a mistake had been made, both people working for Pricewaterhouse.”
Had he been in the truck running the show, Hill said with a laugh, there would have been a lot of screaming going on.
But, in reality, he said: “When a really bad mistake like that happens, you’ve got to be icy calm — there’s no shouting, you have to speak very clearly.”
“It has to be cue Jimmy; Jimmy has to go in and say there’s been a mistake; the winner is Moonlight; do it now.
“The message ... should take seven seconds.”
There have been suggestions Cullinan may have been distracted or star struck — he’d posted, then quickly deleted, a picture of Emma Stone clutching her Best Actress statuette as she walked off stage on Twitter.
Hill can only surmise “something was going on” to make Callinan “hand out the wrong envelope”.
And he knows from experience that the backstage area at the Oscars is “like Flinders St on Friday afternoon”.
“All I can say is when I worked with (Cullinan) last year, he was terribly, terribly professional,” Hill said. “And nothing went wrong, thank God.”
Sydney based crisis PR expert Peter Wilkinson, of the Wilkinson Group, believes Moonlight’s status as the true winner of Best Picture isn’t tarnished by the mistake.
“It’s the reputation of the Oscars that’s tarnished,” he said, adding that the “ripple in the pond” effect will be lapping at certain participants particularly harshly, starting with the auditors, PwC. They Academy, he added, “will be absolutely furious”.
The mess up is a mistake the Oscars really didn’t need, as it attempted to redeem the Awards after last year’s #OscarsSoWhite controversy.
Asked yesterday how Australia’s TV Week Logie Awards go about avoiding such mistakes, a Channel 9 spokesman said there were “a number of processes in place to protect the integrity” of the event.
“Three senior producers check every award to ensure we have the right winners in the correct envelopes. The sealed envelopes are checked again three times on the night of the awards to ensure the presenters have the right envelope before they step on stage.”
If Hill were to have any say on the 2018 Oscars, his method of making sure the snafu didn’t happen again would be simple: “I would have two people on each side — they would both double check: ‘OK, is this the correct envelope? Yes it is. Right, hand it over.’ Two people, either side, they both check that it’s the right envelope.
“It’s worked for 88 years and because of a moment of inattention you’ve got this massive snafu. But it’s such a simply fixed problem, it’s not even worth worrying about.”
Originally published as Australian TV producer David Hill says the time it took to fix the Oscars stuff up is the big drama
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