Oscar Mire

I only caught a bit of the Oscars and may or may not watch more of the ceremony in the days to come. Jimmy Kimmel's material (at least what little I heard) sounded generally funny…but then the times I've caught his show, I always thought his material was better than the guy delivering it. If he came up with the Steve Harvey line at the end, maybe he's sharper than I thought.

That joke was, of course, because the wrong Best Picture was named and after some chaos ensued, La La Land handed the trophy over to Moonlight. I dunno how that happened.

I mean, I know that someone apparently handed the presenters another Best Actress envelope instead of Best Picture. I just don't know how they allowed the folks behind La La Land to make their way to the stage and deliver several speeches before the error was corrected.

You may recall I once wrote about the near miss back in 1985 when Sir Laurence Olivier presented the Best Picture Oscar to the right film by sheer accident. He didn't open the envelope but instead announced the first film on the nominee list was the winner…and it happened that the right film, Amadeus, was first in alphabetical order.

I was told that after that, a fail-safe system was put in place. The company that tallies the votes has people backstage who know what's supposed to be in each envelope and if the wrong "winner" is announced, there's a code or an alert they can issue to stop the proceedings immediately. I dunno if they still have that or if so, why it wasn't operational…but I'll betcha there's more investigations about that then there will be of Donald Trump's Russian connections.