PUSHING THE ENVELOPE

THE OSCARS ACADEMY AWARDS CEREMONY, despite being considered as a game show by many, has always seemed to be a very self-consciously correct performance, running like clockwork and always on cue, with its protagonists keeping to their lines even when drunk, drugged, bored, angry or any mix of these things. Thus, albeit, remarkably, never in its eighty-nine years of history has there been what my friends in the more popular newspapers are calling a "cock-up". Until this year, that is.

I WAS THEREFORE SOMEWHAT SURPRISED to see the two auditors from Price Waterhouse Cooper giving an interview to the Huffington Post on the 24th of February, discussing this very issue. Brian Cullinan and Martha Ruiz, the auditors in question, were asked what would happen if the wrong winner were announced, and replied: "the exact procedure is unknown because no mistake of that kind has been made in the Oscars’ 88-year history." But added, “We would make sure that the correct person was known very quickly,” Cullinan said. “Whether that entails stopping the show, us walking onstage, us signalling to the stage manager — that’s really a game-time decision, if something like that were to happen. Again, it’s so unlikely.”

NO INTERVIEW OF THIS KIND HAS EVER BEEN given to, nor sought by the press in the 83 years of Price Waterhouse auditing the Oscar votes. So the rumours doing the rounds, to use the language that the children adopt nowadays, were that "something major" was about to "go down" at the event. As any film buff knows, there can be no foreshadowing without payoff.

A GLANCE AT THE NOMINEES -- therefore those invited to sit in special seats so as to be seen in extreme close up when needed -- showed that the Academy was doing everything to make up for disappointing people last year when it was deemed that "not enough" people of minorities were selected for awards. Some might have thought that the "something big" would be an astonishing clean sweep of awards for black actors, directors and producers -- an event in itself. And all of this was despite the fact that the runaway favourite had been so heavily hyped into pole position that only a fool would bet against it.

AND THUS, AFTER THE FRACAS at the end of this year's ceremony, there may be people so cynical as to believe that the considerably large percentage of older, white men among the members of the Academy who voted for the Oscar awards this year might have felt somewhat miffed and sulky about having been bullied into having to give a prize to a movie by and about black or gay people instead of the movie that they thought was the best picture.

THESE CYNICAL PEOPLE -- whoever they may be -- might also consider that by engineering a situation in which La La Land was announced as Best Picture, and by allowing the mistake to go uncorrected for long enough for the entire production team and many of the actors to get onto the stage, and by letting the executives make their speeches of gratitude before everything was sorted out these Academy members were making their real feelings felt before reluctantly allowing the PC in America to get the better of the PwC in the la la land that is Hollywood.