When Warren Beatty accidently announced the wrong winner for Best Picture last night the viewing audience went varying degrees of crazy. Of course, if you thought the internet was shocked, you should see the audience in the theater. While those of us watching on television were glued to the commotion on the stage, the audience was dealing with their own shock. Some of the biggest names in Hollywood had no idea what was going on.
In the front row of the Oscar audience, we see members of the Manchester by the Sea cast like Casey Affleck and Michelle Williams in a state of shock. Matt Damon's mouth is literally hanging open as he can't believe what's going on here. Salma Hayek looks like she might be about to scream. The best reactions though are on the far right side of the Los Angeles Times image. Meryl Streep looks like her eyes are about jump right out of her skull. The Rock looks equally confused and blown away.
It was an utterly bizarre scenario. The Best Picture of the year was announced as La La Land, an announcement that shocked pretty much nobody in the world. The musical was the clear front-runner leading into the awards show. However, in the middle of the producers giving their thank you remarks, it was revealed that the wrong envelope had been handed to presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway and that the actual Best Picture winner was Moonlight.
Once it became clear that this wasn't some sort of joke, an entirely new celebration began. Below you can see more stunned faces along with several more people who have taken to their feet, either in disbelief or celebration.
The crazy thing is that if it were any other two movies that got mixed up the reaction would have likely been very different. La La Land was the presumed frontrunner but Moonlight was the only movie that was being given a real chance of stealing the big prize away. Nobody expected them to take it from them in quite that way.
The La La Land producers were gracious in handing over their Oscars to the team behind Moonlight, though one has to assume when the smoke cleared they had numerous emotions to get through. Moonlight's producers were so shocked by what had happened they barely knew how to respond.
The accounting firm responsible for the envelopes is taking responsibility for the mix-up, but we're guessing that a lot of changes will be taking place before next year's awards to be sure nothing like this ever happens again.
