Talk about foreshadowing.

On Fri­day, the Huff­in­g­ton Post ran an arti­cle ask­ing, What would hap­pen if a pre­sen­ter announced the wrong win­ner at the Oscars? The arti­cle, writ­ten by Matthew Jacobs, dis­cussed sev­er­al hypo­thet­i­cal sce­nar­ios that might result in the kind of gaffe that loomed over the finale of last night’s Oscars tele­cast.

La La Land pro­duc­er Jor­dan Horowitz holds up the cor­rect Best Pic­ture enve­lope, show­ing that Moon­light has won. (Pho­to: Eddy Chen/ABC, repro­duced under a Cre­ative Com­mons license.)

Quot­ed in the arti­cle was one of the two peo­ple respon­si­ble for the tab­u­la­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of the awards envelopes: Martha Ruiz of Price­wa­ter­house­C­oop­ers, who cur­rent­ly shares the respon­si­bil­i­ty for Oscar bal­lot­ing with Bri­an Cul­li­nan. Ruiz told Jacobs that they have safe­guards in place to ensure there are no snafus.

It’s him check­ing me and me check­ing him, and we do it mul­ti­ple times against each oth­er to make sure that when we leave and are ulti­mate­ly hand­ing the envelopes to some­one, we’re very con­fi­dent they’re get­ting the right envelopes and the con­tents in them are accurate.

Evi­dent­ly, those safe­guards failed last night, because Ruiz’s part­ner Cul­li­nan some­how man­aged to give War­ren Beat­ty of Bon­nie and Clyde fame the wrong enve­lope before he walked out on stage with Faye Dunaway.

Screen cap­tures from last night’s tele­cast prove that Beat­ty was giv­en a sec­ond copy of the enve­lope and card for Best Actress in a Lead­ing Role — an award that went to Emma Stone for La La Land — instead of the Best Pic­ture envelope.

Some view­ers have expressed con­fu­sion at why there is more than one enve­lope for each award, but the sim­ple expla­na­tion is that redun­dan­cy is very impor­tant. Pre­sen­ters enter from dif­fer­ent sides of the stage, and if some­thing were to hap­pen to one set of envelopes, there’s a sec­ond set that can serve as backups.

Beat­ty’s reac­tion upon open­ing the enve­lope he’d been giv­en was one of con­fu­sion. He looked up and then at his co-pre­sen­ter Dun­away with­out dis­clos­ing what he’d seen. Then, after she prompt­ed him to speak (“You’re impos­si­ble. C’mon!”), he showed her the card. With­out paus­ing to study it close­ly her­self, she mis­tak­en­ly pro­nounced La La Land the winner.

“I want to tell you what hap­pened,” Beat­ty said a cou­ple of min­utes lat­er to a shocked audi­ence. “I opened the enve­lope and it said, ‘Emma Stone, ‘La La Land.’ That’s why I took such a long look at Faye, and at you. I wasn’t try­ing to be funny.”

The unan­swered ques­tion now is why no one ran out on stage imme­di­ate­ly after Dun­away’s pro­nounce­ment to make an imme­di­ate correction.

“It does­n’t sound very com­pli­cat­ed, but you have to make sure you’re giv­ing the pre­sen­ter the right enve­lope,” Cul­li­nan him­self wrote on Medi­um not long ago.

He failed to do so, and this may be his last Oscars gig as a consequence.

Cul­li­nan also boast­ed “we always do a good job” and declared the Acad­e­my has “absolute trust in us and what we do”. It would seem that trust has been shaken.

Cul­li­nan spent a por­tion of last night excit­ed­ly tweet­ing pho­tos from back­stage. He has since delet­ed those tweets, appar­ent­ly out of embarrassment.

His firm, mean­while, was forced to issue a pub­lic apol­o­gy and promise to inves­ti­gate what hap­pened. But even the apol­o­gy was in error: it claimed the mis­take had been “imme­di­ate­ly cor­rect­ed”, when in fact it had not been. It was a full two min­utes before the audi­ence at the Dol­by The­ater and mil­lions watch­ing around the globe were informed that Moon­light, not La La Land, had real­ly won Best Picture.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to Moon­light, the real Best Pic­ture win­ners for 2017!

POSTSCRIPT: Price­wa­ter­house­C­oop­ers has tak­en full respon­si­bil­i­ty for its error and con­firmed that they and they alone were at fault.

This is the state­ment they should have released to begin with:

PwC takes full respon­si­bil­i­ty for the series of mis­takes and breach­es of estab­lished pro­to­cols dur­ing last night’s Oscars. PwC Part­ner Bri­an Cul­li­nan mis­tak­en­ly hand­ed the back-up enve­lope for Actress in a Lead­ing Role instead of the enve­lope for Best Pic­ture to pre­sen­ters War­ren Beat­ty and Faye Dunaway.

Once the error occurred, pro­to­cols for cor­rect­ing it were not fol­lowed through quick­ly enough by Mr. Cul­li­nan or his partner.

We are deeply sor­ry for the dis­ap­point­ment suf­fered by the cast and crew of “La La Land” and “Moon­light.” We sin­cere­ly apol­o­gize to War­ren Beat­ty, Faye Dun­away, Jim­my Kim­mel, ABC, and the Acad­e­my, none of whom was at fault for last night’s errors.

We wish to extend our deep­est grat­i­tude to each of them for the gra­cious­ness they dis­played dur­ing such a dif­fi­cult moment.

For the past eighty-three years, the Acad­e­my has entrust­ed PwC with the integri­ty of the awards process dur­ing the cer­e­mo­ny, and last night we failed the Academy.

Bet­ter late than nev­er. Props to PwC for own­ing their fail­ure and being will­ing to say We failed. That’s impor­tant. Account­abil­i­ty matters.