In the upcoming book Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears, releasing Feb. 21, Michael Schulman explores the history of Hollywood’s biggest night by deep diving into eleven different phenomena from the last 100 years. The New Yorker scribe explores the plot against Citizen Kane, the Hollywood blacklist, and the Shakespeare in Love campaign (there’s also an afterword dedicated to the slap, of course). In the below exclusive excerpt, he re-investigates Envelopegate, that infamous 2017 incident when the wrong Best Picture winner was announced.

The decision to ask Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway to present Best Picture was an obvious one. It was the fiftieth anniversary of Bonnie and Clyde, the film that had helped usher in the New Hollywood. The producers of the 2017 ceremony, Michael De Luca and Jennifer Todd, were Oscar buffs who loved the tradition of bringing in legends for the final envelope. De Luca called Beatty, who “mulled and wanted to make sure that Faye was on board,” he recalls. “She had—not conditions, but some requests. It was a little bit of negotiating.”

One point of negotiation was who would announce the winner. It was decided that Dunaway would introduce the nominees and then Beatty would do the honors. Acknowledging the fraught year gone by, in which the Academy had navigated the thorny aftermath of #OscarsSoWhite, he would also make some opening remarks about “the increasing diversity in our community.”

When they got to rehearsal, though, Dunaway wanted to read out the winner. “I should do this,” she kept nudging. Beatty, having experienced half a century of Dunaway’s antics, gave her a wry “here we go again” look and went the flirtatious route. “He teased Faye,” De Luca says, “wouldn’t give her the envelope, and it was a little comic bit.” With some gentle diplomacy, the producers kept the original plan intact.

De Luca and Todd had enough to deal with. The host, Jimmy Kimmel, wanted to sneak in a busload of tourists during the ceremony, a stunt that took weeks of planning. At another point, candy parachutes would rain from the ceiling for the stars to grab at. And in the event that President Trump tweeted about the Oscars during the broadcast, Kimmel would live-tweet back at him from the stage—an idea that proved technically complicated, as his phone screen had to be projected onto the set.

Then there were endless minutiae. The Friday before the show, an Academy staffer showed Todd and De Luca a prototype of the winner cards, which for the first time weren’t printed by the Academy’s regular stationery company. Todd, who wears glasses, asked that they be reprinted in a bigger font, so that the presenters wouldn’t have to squint. “But,” she recalls, “Mike and I never saw the outside of the envelope,” on which the categories were printed in a gold-on-maroon color scheme that was difficult to read. And instead of a faux-wax seal with an easy-to-pull ribbon, as in past years, the new envelope was sealed with a cumbersome piece of tape.

Another minor irritant was Brian Cullinan, one of two PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants responsible for overseeing the envelopes. The Oscar accountants, each stationed on one side of the stage, were the only people privy to the results, and each memorized the winners beforehand in the event of a problem. That week, Cullinan and his colleague Martha Ruiz gave an interview in which they were asked what would happen if the wrong winner were announced. “We would make sure that the correct person was known very quickly,” Cullinan said, adding that they would check with each other and then inform the stage manager. But was that the protocol? Before the show, the accountants buttonholed stage managers Gary Natoli and John Esposito to clarify.

“If you know who the winner is, you don’t need to check with each other,” Natoli recalled telling Cullinan. “You need to immediately go out and rectify the situation, ideally before the wrong winners get to the mic.” In any case, such a scenario was absurdly unlikely.

Cullinan, a PwC partner who lived in Malibu and rode a Harley-Davidson, was a dead ringer for Matt Damon. During an onstage bit at the 2015 Oscars, host Neil Patrick Harris had ribbed Cullinan about the resemblance. The next year, Cullinan tweeted a photo of himself and his doppelgänger from the red carpet. In the days before the 2017 ceremony, he asked Jennifer Todd if there was any way for him to do another comedy bit during the show. “I was like, ‘I’ll let you know if anything comes up. It’s really up to Jimmy and the writers,’” she recalls. “And then he followed up via email: ‘Hey, did you come up with anything?’” Todd and De Luca asked telecast director Glenn Weiss, “What do we do about the Pricewaterhouse guy?”

“I’ll throw him in a bumper,” Weiss said, meaning a quick shot before a commercial break.

“Okay,” Todd said. “It’s off our plate?”

The morning of the show, February 26, 2017, began with multiple crises. Bill Paxton had died the day before and needed to be worked into the “In Memoriam” segment. At the final dress rehearsal, part of the set malfunctioned and knocked over two miniature art deco buildings. “It sounded like a bomb exploded,” De Luca recalls. Jimmy Kimmel remembers, “That was a bad omen just to begin.” In the writers’ room, the comedian’s wife thought the building was collapsing and threw their daughter under a desk. Some fifty technicians had to be called in for repairs. “We thought that was going to be the big thing of the day,” Todd says.

Heading into the show, the La La Land team was cautiously steeling for victory. “When we were walking on the red carpet into the Oscars, almost everybody said we were going to win,” a La La Land publicist recalls. “And yet all of us had a stomachache that night, thinking, This is definitely not a done deal.”

The first award was Best Supporting Actor, which went to Moonlight’s Mahershala Ali. Hm, director Barry Jenkins thought. This is interesting. Later, he and Tarell Alvin McCraney won Best Adapted Screenplay. In his speech, Jenkins struck a defiant chord: “All you people out there who feel like there’s no mirror for you, that your life is not reflected, the Academy has your back, the ACLU has your back, we have your back. And for the next four years, we will not leave you alone. We will not forget you.”

La La Land immediately lost a string of categories—Costume Design, Sound Editing—before winning for Production Design. “When those crafts categories didn’t go the way that we had hoped they would go, we were like, Ooh, there may be something amiss for us,” La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz recalls. The editing prize, often an indicator for Best Picture, went to Hacksaw Ridge, eliciting flashbacks to Trump winning Pennsylvania early on Election Night. Could the Academy’s conservative wing strike back for Mel Gibson?

It would have likely unsettled Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the Academy’s first Black president. After the #OscarsSoWhite fiasco the previous year, she had spearheaded the Academy’s initiative to diversify its membership and bore the brunt of the backlash. Boone Isaacs was a member of Soka Gakkai International, a Buddhist sect boasting celebrity adherents like Tina Turner and Orlando Bloom. Every morning and evening, she chanted nam-myoho-renge-kyo to the Gohonzon, an enshrined scroll that hung in her living room in Hancock Park. Buddhism, she says, had taught her to “look at adversity as an opportunity to improve your fate,” a precept that had proved useful during the Academy’s tumultuous year.

Now she appeared, wearing a strapless black dress, to make a speech about the industry “becoming more inclusive and diverse with each passing day.” She had detected a late surge for Hidden Figures, about three Black women who had worked in the NASA space program and who, like her, had spent their careers in a white man’s world.

La La Land director Damien Chazelle had passed the week in bed with a 103-degree fever. “I was pumped up with steroids at the ceremony,” he recalls. “My fever had just broken. I was already sort of delirious.” Toward the end of the night, Halle Berry presented him with the Best Directing award. Then Casey Affleck won Best Actor, after months of carefully calibrated media appearances that downplayed his sexual harassment scandal, apparently with success. On stage left, PwC’s Martha Ruiz handed Leonardo DiCaprio the Best Actress envelope. The winner was Emma Stone, a hopeful sign for La La Land. Horowitz recalls, “Damien won and then Emma won, and we were like, Oh, man, maybe this is actually going to work out.”

When it was time for the final award, Brian Cullinan, on stage right, handed the envelope to Warren Beatty. After Dunaway introduced the nominees, as planned, Beatty opened it and looked at the card. Something about it didn’t make sense. He looked in the envelope to see if he had missed anything, then glanced at Dunaway. He stammered, “And the Academy Award . . . for Best Picture . . .”

Jimmy Kimmel was sitting in the second row with Matt Damon; he was planning to close the show with a running joke about their mock rivalry. The day before, he had watched Dunaway and Beatty rehearse more times than seemed normal. “It put this idea in my head that maybe they couldn’t see the teleprompter,” he says. “So, that was in my head throughout the confusion, that maybe Warren couldn’t see the card.”

Onstage, Dunaway threw up her hands, laughing. “You’re impossible,” she told Beatty. Surely, she was thinking back to his teasing at the rehearsal. He showed her the card, befuddled. But maybe this was him being chivalrous and finally agreeing to let her read the winner. Dunaway glanced at the card and read over a drumroll, “La La Land.”

As the music played, Jenkins allowed the speech he’d prepared to slip from his mind. He’d been thinking for months about how a kid like Chiron, the central character in Moonlight, could never have dreamed of making a film that got eight Academy Award nominations. “It’s a dream I never allowed myself to have,” he said later. “When we were sitting there, and that dream of winning didn’t come true, I took it off the table.”

***

Jordan Horowitz had made a deal with his coproducers early in awards season: they could speak first at every ceremony where La La Land won, but if they won at the Oscars, Horowitz would go first. Then he tried to put the whole thing out of his mind. As Beatty stumbled, he thought, Oh, what an asshole for delaying it so much.

When Dunaway finally read out the winner, Horowitz let out a “primal scream.” He says, “I had allowed myself fully into the expectations game, and I needed to win. It was really important to me, and I let out this scream. And my wife took me by the shoulders, and she looked at me and said, ‘You need to calm down.’” He took a deep breath.

Onstage, he took the envelope from Beatty and the surprisingly heavy statuette from Dunaway. He made his speech, then turned the mic over to his coproducer Marc Platt. As Platt spoke, Horowitz noticed a commotion. “People are scurrying around, but nobody really knows what’s happening. It’s very clear that shit’s unwinding in some way.” A man in a headset—stage manager Gary Natoli—came toward him, saying, “Where’s the card? Let me see it.”

Horowitz looked down at the card in his hand, which bore the inexplicable words “Emma Stone, La La Land.” “My overwhelming feeling at that moment is that time stopped,” he recalls. “I knew Emma had her card, because I had seen Emma’s card, and all of a sudden I was holding Emma’s card, and it made absolutely no sense whatsoever, so the only explanation I had for it was like some kind of fucked-up magic, some time-stoppage magic.”

Natoli took the card and walked offstage. “And then I realized, Oh, they fucked up,” Horowitz says. “We didn’t win Best Picture. And I’m fairly certain—and you can see this on the tape—the moment that I fully recognize it, I drop my hand, and I remember feeling the weight of the thing that I already thought was heavy got, like, ten times heavier.”

***

Moments earlier, on stage right, Brian Cullinan had pushed through the spectators in the wings and informed stage manager John Esposito that he thought the wrong winner had been announced. “Are you sure?” Esposito said. “I’m positive,” the accountant told him. Esposito radioed Natoli, who was crouched in the audience near Kimmel. Natoli sent word to stage left to check with the other accountant, Martha Ruiz, who confirmed that Moonlight was the winner. “Get the accountants out there!” Natoli urged over his headset. But neither accountant budged. “We had to push them onstage, which was just shocking to me,” Natoli said later. “Brian had led us to believe that Faye had just said it incorrectly. So, I went looking for the envelope.”

Oscar producers Michael De Luca and Jennifer Todd were backstage celebrating the end of a successful evening. “We were high-fiving,” De Luca says. “I took off my headphones and was drinking a Diet Coke.” Emma Stone’s speech had ended seconds before midnight, meaning they’d hit their mark for the final commercial break. “So, then we were like, ‘Fuck it! La La Land, they can talk as long as they want,’” Todd says. “That’s when I remember somebody put a glass of champagne in front of me. We were done!”

Todd put her headset on a table. When she heard yelling coming from it, she put it back on. “It was Gary, the stage manager, and Glenn, the director. And they were like, ‘We think it’s the wrong envelope.’” She shrieked, “They announced the wrong picture.”

“The tone in Jenn’s voice—it was like out of a Fritz Lang movie,” De Luca says. “The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I couldn’t comprehend the sentence. It was one of those surreal moments where the worst thing ever is described to you, and the people responsible for it have said it could never happen.”

***

Cheryl Boone Isaacs was watching from the audience. When La La Land was announced, she wasn’t surprised, because the movie had heart. “It’s like the year of Shakespeare in Love. I kept saying to people, ‘That’s going to win.’ It’s that heart thing,” she says. After all she had gone through at the Academy, it was a low-key end to a turbulent year.

Then she noticed Natoli coming onstage, with Brian Cullinan trailing behind him. “Brian is always tan, and he wasn’t tan, like he’d lost all color in his face,” she recalls. “I just thought, Why is he why is he—are you kidding me? I felt like Al Pacino: ‘Just when I thought I was out . . . !’ It was very fast and very slow in my head. It happened very quickly, and yet it took forever.”

A few rows ahead of her, Matt Damon leaned over to Kimmel. “He does not remember saying this, but I distinctly remember him telling me, ‘They gave the award to the wrong movie,’” Kimmel says. “For a moment, I just felt like a member of the audience watching. And then it occurred to me that I was really the only one with a microphone on and that I should probably go up, because there were no other options.”

***

Onstage, the third La La Land producer, Fred Berger, was thanking Damien Chazelle, who stood behind him watching the commotion in a daze. “It was panic,” Chazelle recalls. “The more you could see, the more it looked like someone had died or there’d been some fucking terrorist attack.” Ryan Gosling, who assumed there had been a medical emergency, broke into laughter when he realized what was going on. Berger, picking up the chatter behind him, ended his speech, “We lost, by the way.”

Jordan Horowitz had regained his focus. “I start to look around, and I’m like, So, how are we going to solve this? Whatever was happening, it was taking too long for my taste.” He took to the microphone and said, “There’s a mistake. Moonlight, you guys won Best Picture.” There were gasps, and tentative applause. To some, it sounded like Horowitz was just being gallant: La La Land may have won, but Moonlight had won some larger battle. “This is not a joke,” Horowitz insisted. “Moonlight has won Best Picture.”

With millions of eyes on him, he had a split second to think. “It was very clear that nobody had any fucking idea what was happening. You could see it on people’s faces, like, What is this person doing? Is this a mistake? A joke? And that’s when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Warren standing next to me with the red card, and I suddenly realized they had to see it—they had to see the card that said Moonlight.” Like King Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, he snatched the card from Beatty and held it up, thinking, “I hope this camera operator knows what to do.” The audience, stunned, rose to its feet.

Kimmel took the microphone. His foremost thought was that the La La Land people would feel terrible. “We gave someone an Oscar and have to take it away from them and give it to somebody else, which is a first,” he recalls. “So, you have to handle that very delicately, and I don’t typically excel as far as handling things delicately goes.” Onstage, he joked to Horowitz, “I would like to see you get an Oscar anyway. Why can’t we just give out a whole bunch of them?”

But Kimmel was missing the uncomfortable symbolism, a year after #OscarsSoWhite, of asking a Black movie that had won to share the moment with a white movie that hadn’t. Horowitz, though, saw the enormity of the moment. “I was definitely not in the mood for jokes,” he says. Cutting off Kimmel, he said decisively, “I’m going to be really proud to hand this to my friends from Moonlight.”

The Moonlight team had registered the chaos with disbelief. “We had to be told to move,” producer Adele Romanski recalls. She’d assumed the chaos was some kind of bomb threat. In the aisle, Andrew Garfield embraced her. “What’s happening?” she asked. Garfield told her, “You have to go on the stage.”

The La La Land producers handed the statuettes to their counterparts and hugged them. After a year of bitter divides, racial and political, it was a rare image of harmony. Gosling stood on the steps shaking everyone’s hands. As the faces onstage changed from mostly white to mostly Black, Beatty stepped in front of the mic. “I want to tell you what happened,” he told America, explaining that the card had read “Emma Stone,” which is why he had stared at Dunaway so blankly.

Next to him, Kimmel saw Denzel Washington in the audience mouthing a single word at him and pointing. The word was: “BARRY.” Oh, right, Kimmel thought. The real winners had to speak.

Barry Jenkins now heard himself giving a half-thrilled, half-baffled acceptance speech. “Very clearly, even in my dreams this could not be true,” he said. “But to hell with dreams! I’m done with it, ’cause this is true. Oh, my goodness!”

“I’m still not sure this is real,” Romanski said next. She turned around to acknowledge the La La Land crew, but they had vanished. The cameras cut to the slack-jawed spectators: Octavia Spencer, Samuel L. Jackson. The Moonlight team ambled offstage, where their La La Land friends were crowded in the wings: two movies that would be forever entwined. No one knew what to feel, except confusion. What the hell had just happened?

***

In the moments after the ceremony, the Dolby Theatre was like Dealey Plaza, with a thousand Oscar-caliber Zapruders. Instead of the second gunman, there was talk of a second envelope. On social media, people were posting grainy close-ups of Leonardo DiCaprio holding the Best Actress envelope and then of Beatty walking back onstage with it. In the pressroom, Emma Stone thickened the plot when she said, “I also was holding my Best Actress in a Leading Role card that entire time. So, whatever story—I don’t mean to start stuff, but whatever story that was, I had that card.” An old Hollywood genre was revived: the whodunit.

Jimmy Kimmel had not even gotten offstage when someone asked him, “Was this a prank?” He was dumbfounded that anyone would assume the envelopes had been switched on purpose, but it was as reasonable as any other explanation. When he saw De Luca and Todd, he joked, referring to the set collapse of hours earlier, “As if World War Two today wasn’t enough? We needed this?”

Nearby, someone asked Beatty for the envelopes. “I’m not handing this to anyone,” he replied. He held them high above his head, so no one could snatch them. Beatty had been famous long enough to know how quickly public perception could crystallize. Already, social media observers were speculating that he and Dunaway were senile. When his wife, Annette Bening, called him to ask what had happened, he said, “I have the envelopes, and I’m not giving them to anyone.” As he told Oscar head writer Jon Macks the next day, “I wanted to hold the envelope to preserve the chain of evidence.” (“What is this,” Macks replied, “CSI: Oscar?”) Dunaway had already slipped off to the Governors Ball, after snacking on some backstage cashews. “She headed for the hills,” Kimmel says.

Backstage, Kimmel was giving a toast to his writers when someone approached De Luca and Todd and whispered, “Warren’s in the greenroom and wants to talk to you both.” When they found him, Todd recalls, “Warren was very shaken up.” Some fifteen minutes after the show ended, the interested parties assembled like suspects from Clue: Beatty, who held the murder weapon; the two Oscar producers; Kimmel; Academy CEO Dawn Hudson; communications director Teni Melidonian; Boone Isaacs; ABC vice president of communications Richard Horrmann; stage manager Gary Natoli; and Brian Cullinan, in the role of the suspicious butler. “What happened, dudes?” Boone Isaacs asked.

Beatty held up the evidence and said, “This is the envelope somebody gave me, and then this is the envelope someone handed me later.” One read, “Emma Stone.” The other read, “Moonlight.”

Cullinan stood in the corner, shaking his head. “He was still trying to pretend like Faye had read it wrong, even though he must have known what happened,” Todd recalls. But Cullinan hadn’t put the pieces together, and he was baffled that Beatty was holding the Moonlight envelope while saying he’d been given the wrong one. Everyone else saw a guilty accountant trying to deflect. De Luca says, “It wasn’t exactly a profile in courage.”

Kimmel tried to keep the mood light, inviting Beatty on his late-night talk show. “That would be great—for you,” Beatty retorted. “We were just all asking questions,” Kimmel recalls. “And I remember as I was trying to get to the bottom of it, I was thinking, I have no business being here asking any questions. I’m the host of the show, and it’s over! But I knew I’d have to go on the air the next night and explain what had happened.”

After a few minutes, director Glenn Weiss came in. “Look, it’s the wrong envelope,” he said, opening his iPad to reveal a magnified shot of Beatty holding the Best Actress envelope. It would take several more hours to piece together the rest: both accountants had an entire set of envelopes, one for each side of the stage. When one person handed an envelope to the presenter, the other was supposed to put the unused duplicate in a briefcase and move on to the next. When DiCaprio went out to present, he had taken the Best Actress envelope from Ruiz on stage left. On stage right, Cullinan was concerned that the presenters would futz over the tape on the back of the envelope and was showing each person that it was easier to slip a finger under the flap and pop it open. After Emma Stone won, Cullinan had two envelopes left in his hand: Best Picture on top and the Best Actress duplicate on the bottom. He flipped them over to show Beatty the trick with the tape, which put the Best Actress duplicate on top. He then mistakenly handed the duplicate Best Actress envelope to Beatty and tossed the Best Picture envelope in his briefcase and forgot all about it.

In the greenroom, Dawn Hudson turned to Cullinan. “Your one job was to give Warren the right envelope.”

“No,” the accountant said, bewildered. Minutes before the screwup, he had tweeted a backstage photo of Emma Stone. “The lesson here is we’re too celebrity-obsessed as a culture,” De Luca says. “It’s even poisoned accountants.” Cullinan deleted the Emma Stone photo and was gone before anyone noticed. “He basically disappeared,” Kimmel says.

Moments later, Moonlight producer Adele Romanski got in an elevator to the Governors Ball and found herself standing next to Warren Beatty. “He was gripping the [Best Picture] envelope, and I remember some person who worked at the awards was asking him for it, and he refused, adamantly refused to hand it over, and then got up to wherever the elevator took us, and Barry was up there, and at that point he gave it to Barry. And Barry has the envelope, and he has it framed now.”

At the ball, as guests lined up for iced octopus tentacles and chocolate Oscar lollipops, the usual air of celebration was more like bewilderment. Some thought the envelope mix-up was great live television, others a historic embarrassment for the Academy in a year of embarrassments. Some speculated that it had been staged to boost ratings. Beatty was on the phone with Bening, who was telling him, “Warren, come home.”

“No,” Beatty insisted. “I have done nothing wrong.”

At Lionsgate’s afterparty at Soho House, the La La Land crew tried to reconcile the disappointment of losing with the absurdity of having fake-won. “It wasn’t happy or sad,” Horowitz says. “It was just different. It was a third thing that nobody could have anticipated, and we were all sort of just processing that in real time.”

The Moonlight people were also ambivalent. Mahershala Ali later told The Hollywood Reporter, “It never quite felt like we won, even though we won, in part because we were so connected with the La La Land people. In that moment, I don’t think we could be as joyous. It wasn’t what it should have been.” Barry Jenkins ended the night at 3 a.m. in his suite at the Four Seasons. After sleeping for a few hours, he woke up and watched the clip on his phone, oddly charmed by the way the two films had come together. “It’s messy,” he told a reporter that morning, “but it’s kind of gorgeous.”

Boone Isaacs awoke for a day of damage control. She had insisted that PwC put out a late-night statement before the Academy: “I was adamant that they needed to come out first to acknowledge the error.” As disastrous as the show’s finale had been, she realized that it could have been worse—say, if the broadcast had ended before Moonlight got to accept the award, or if the reverse had happened and the statuettes had to be taken from Black hands and given to white ones.

Even so, she felt “sadness for the filmmakers. As beautifully as they acted, did we steal a moment?” Before heading to Academy headquarters, she knelt before her Gohonzon. “I was just chanting, hoping that they all understood that it was purely an accident, this is not malicious, this is not underhanded. This was something that was read incorrectly. Why, I don’t know. This is bigger than us.”

Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.