Oh right, it’s been roughly two months and we haven’t really heard from Faye Dunaway about what happened on the Oscars stage when she mistakenly announced La La Land as the winner of Best Picture, when Moonlight actually won. Dunaway says she felt “very guilty.”
In an interview with Lester Holt for NBC Nightly News, Dunaway recapped the sequence of events from that fateful February night which some of us have studied over and over with as much fervency and bewilderment as JFK investigators. It’s certainly haunted Faye Dunaway.
“He took the card out and he didn’t say anything. He paused,” she tells Holt with a chuckle, referring to her co-presenter Warren Beatty. “He looked over to me, off stage, he looked around. And I finally said, ‘You’re impossible.’ I thought he was joking…And I read the name of the film on the card.” No new information. In the midst of the confusion, Dunaway dashed off stage, leaving Beatty to explain what was happening.
We know now that PricewaterhouseCoopers accountant Brian Cullinan gave them the wrong envelope and is largely to blame. So Holt tells Dunaway the mistake “clearly wasn’t your fault” and asks whether she was stunned. “We were…I won’t say deer in the headlight, but you are completely stunned,” she says. “You don’t know what has happened.” She adds, “I was very guilty. I thought, I could’ve done something surely. Why didn’t I see Emma Stone’s name on the top of the card?”
If Dunaway is still asking herself this question, then this mystery may never truly be solved.
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