Tinseltown’s horror was a delight for TV viewers

What happened on the Oscar stage on Sunday night was a spontaneous eruption of reality, writes Rob Long

The moment of discovery at the Academy Awards. Chris Pizzello /AP

In 1993, when a young – and mostly unknown – actress won an Oscar for her dazzling comic turn in the hilarious film, My Cousin Vinny, a lot of people thought that there had been a mistake. The presenter that night was Hollywood icon Jack Palance, an actor who had appeared in dozens of westerns and who was by 1993 just this side of doddering. Maybe even a bit on the other side, truth be told. He opened the envelope to present the Best Supporting Actress award and seemed to pause a bit and lose his concentration before he announced the winner.

The other nominees were an almost diabolically-assembled group of heavy-hitting actresses. Vanessa Redgrave was up that year, as was the widow of Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright. Long-time stage and screen leading women Judy Davis and Miranda Richardson rounded out the nominees. Marisa Tomei – young, untested, fresh from a role on a daytime television drama – seemed like the very longest of long shots, so when a befuddled Palance called out her name, a lot of people wondered if maybe he had done a little last-minute freelancing and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had just decided that it was less embarrassing to just let it go.

There were, of course, perfectly good reasons why we can be sure Tomei truly won that award on the square. First, her performance was terrific, and the Academy regularly hands the Best Supporting awards to newcomers who make a noticeable splash. Second, the collection of old-timers she was up against probably split a lot of votes among them, leaving Tomei to scoop up a winning plurality. Finally, these things are tough to hide, and even tougher to cover up. At some point in the ensuing 24 years, someone would have unearthed the true vote tally.

The reason this rumour has lasted so long, though, is because people – especially people in Hollywood – can’t imagine a world in which every flaw and blemish isn’t instantly vanished with make-up, special effects, plastic surgery or clever accounting. Hollywood is a place where mistakes simply don’t exist. They happen, of course – no one and no industry is immune to error – but in Hollywood we have plenty of time and tools to smooth over the rough spots. If Jack Palance blurted out the wrong name, goes the conspiracy theory, the powers that rule the entertainment industry would swoop in with airbrushes and cover stories and rewrite the ballot results.

That’s what we do in Hollywood. We fix mistakes before the audience sees them. When an actor flubs a line, we call “Cut!” And we do it again. When an actress trips over her own feet, we call “Back to One!” And everyone goes back to their first positions to restart the scene. A movie or television set is a symphony of mistakes and pratfalls and do-overs that the audience never knows about.

When we make a film requiring special visual effects, we erase the guidelines that control the model of the spaceship, we digitally enhance the laser blast from the hero’s weapon, we create tidal waves and car crashes and entire battlefields where there were only a couple of actors moving against a bright green backdrop. If an actor or actress shows up for work a bit puffy and red-eyed from a too-late evening, the hair and make-up departments go to work and transform them back into objects of allure. We can even give a bald man a thick head of hair.

So a few nights ago, when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway – both, it needs to be said, entering the Jack Palance phase of their careers – opened the Best Picture award envelope and announced the wrong winner, you could almost hear the audience gathered in the Kodak Theater on Hollywood Boulevard call out a collective “Cut!” You could see the entertainment industry professionals squirming in their seats as they watched one of the only real disasters anyone in show business can imagine unfolding, which is a mistake that cannot be reshot, covered over or erased by special effects.

What happened on the Oscar stage that night was a spontaneous eruption of reality and Hollywood hates that more than anything.

Beatty and Dunaway are iconic old-style movie stars. Both of them are legendary for demanding the perfect wrinkle-erasing lighting effects and soft-focus close-ups. Beatty especially is a perfection-driven director and producer, someone known for endless rewrites and multiple takes. Dunaway, it is said, rarely emerges in public in anything less than full make-up and perfect hair. You couldn’t have asked, in other words, for a more appropriate duo to deliver an unfixable slap to Hollywood’s obsession with making everything look seamless.

“Never show the wires,” is an old show business axiom. But as media becomes more spontaneous and homemade – Snapchat videos, Facebook Live posts, YouTube channels and the like – the audience is becoming more interested in the wires and less in the illusion. People watching the Oscars on television last Sunday night were delighted by the crazy and unexpected moment when the wrong winner was announced. They loved the awkward and unrehearsed way the true winner was brought to the stage. The people watching from inside the theatre hated every minute of it. Too bad for them.

Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl