Oscar gaffe makes for a whodunit: is tweet the smoking gun?
LOS ANGELES — Moments before he handed out the wrong envelope in one of the worst gaffes in Academy Award history, PwC accountant Brian Cullinan tweeted a behind-the-scenes photo of winner Emma Stone holding her statuette. “Best Actress Emma Stone backstage!” the tweet read.
It’s one potential clue in the whodunit that Sunday’s ceremony became after presenters Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty mistakenly proclaimed “La La Land” as the best-picture winner instead of “Moonlight.”
Cullinan was one of two accountants for PwC, formerly Price Waterhouse Coopers, tasked with doling out the envelopes containing winners’ names to the presenters. But the envelope that Cullinan gave to Dunaway and Beatty was a duplicate of the previously announced win for Stone, not for best picture.
The photo tweeted by Cullinan, which was first reported Monday by The Wall Street Journal, would have been taken in the minutes leading up to the top picture award — raising the question of whether the accountant was distracted from the task at hand. Although the tweet had been deleted from the social media site, a copy of it was kept by Google and available through a cache page.