Ryan Gosling was so confused by the drama at the end of last year’s (17) Oscars ceremony he thought someone had been taken seriously ill.
The actor was onstage celebrating La La Land’s Best Picture win when it was announced there had been a mistake and presenter Warren Beatty had read from the wrong card.
As Academy Awards bosses tried to relay that message to the audience and viewers at home – and reveal Moonlight had actually won gold – there was chaos both on and offstage, and Gosling admits he felt sure there was an emergency.
In a new recap article for The Hollywood Reporter, the actor says, “I felt like someone had been hurt. I thought there was some kind of medical situation.”
Beatty has also recalled the most dramatic end to the Oscars, confessing he thought there had been an error when he first looked at the announcement card he had been given by a distracted accountant backstage.
“I thought, ‘Well, maybe this is a misprint’. And then: ‘I shouldn’t foul up the show just because someone made a little error’.”
But Moonlight star Mahershala Ali, who had picked up the Best Supporting Actor award earlier in the evening, admits he knew what was going on and was one of the first people to realize his film had been chosen as Best Picture: “I looked up on the monitor. When I saw that people at home could see security onstage, I literally said, ‘Oh, we won’. I don’t know what made me think that.”
Meanwhile, watching at home Beatty’s wife Annette Bening and their daughter were beside themselves: “It was sort of like a dream, and my daughter and I both just started screaming, basically. We were stunned.”
Meanwhile, host Jimmy Kimmel, who will be back to front the 2018 Oscars on Sunday (04Mar18), has poked fun at last year’s flub in a new ad, in which he appears to be chatting to a therapist about the drama, but it’s actually Beatty, who urges the funnyman to “get out of my house”.
The muddled moment is featured at the beginning of the new ad as Kimmel awakes from a nightmare and reveals he’s always thinking about the Best Picture mishap, joking he can no longer open an envelope as mail piles up at his door.
The comedian also tries to destroy every memory of his 2017 hosting gig by setting fire to the tuxedo he wore.
