Two accountants said to be responsible for Sunday’s Oscars flub, wherein the wrong movie was announced as the winner of Best Picture, will not be allowed back onto the awards show. The Associated Press reports that Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the president of the film academy, told the news agency that Brian Cullinan and Martha Ruiz will not be asked back for future ceremonies. The Academy’s relationship with PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting firm responsible for the results of the show, is still under review.
A series of intensely analyzed photos from backstage, obtained by Variety, show Cullinan on his cellular phone in the moments before the fuck up. He was tweeting out a picture of Emma Stone, who had just come backstage after winning her Best Actress award. Per an exhaustive timeline constructed by Variety:
In the exclusive images below, Cullinan can be seen on his mobile phone at 9:04 p.m. PST, according to the metadata on the photographer’s camera (his Emma Stone tweet was posted at 9:05 p.m. and later deleted). Meanwhile Beatty and Dunaway had taken the stage at 9:03 p.m., putting the PWC executive on social media at the start of Beatty and Dunaway’s presentation.
Another photo shows that Cullinan had two different envelopes in hand, along with his cellphone, just before the mixup; one is the backup envelope for Best Actress, which is what he handed Beatty. The other is the correct envelope, which cites Moonlight as the Oscar winner. It is fairly obvious from the deep analysis that this man is responsible for robbing Moonlight of its spot in the sun, all for posting a pic of Emma Stone.
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In another photo, Ruiz is shown walking onstage to hand the correct envelope to Cullinan. It is unclear why Ruiz is being held responsible for any of this hullabaloo, as even this most intense analysis shows she simply did her job.
Elsewhere, The Hollywood Reporter notes that PWC chairman Tim Ryan, who is based in New York, has stayed in Los Angeles following the debacle, in an attempt to mollify individual Academy members’ concerns. PWC has worked with the Oscars for 83 of the awards’ 89 years.
