The Big Picture
- The mix-up at the 89th Academy Awards between La La Land and Moonlight was a historic and chaotic moment in the Academy's history.
- Sammy Davis Jr.'s mix-up at the 36th Academy Awards was similar, though not nearly as well remembered as the La La Land/Moonlight mix-up.
- What made the La La Land/Moonlight mix-up worse was how La La Land producers started to make their speeches before everyone caught the mistake.
The 89th Academy Awards seemed to be just heading for a quiet, unremarkable ending. Everything had gone reasonably swimmingly up to that point, no need for alarm. Then it came time to announce Best Picture and a pair of silver screen legends, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, emerged to deliver the final winner of the night. History was quickly made when Beatty opened the envelope, saw what was written inside, hesitated, and then Dunaway grabbed the envelope to declare "La La Land!" It seemed the Best Picture winner had been clear and...wait, not so fast! There was a mix-up! "This is not a joke," La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz announced to an enraptured audience, "Moonlight, you've just won Best Picture!"
The calamity that lasted from that moment is hard to describe. Utter chaos transpired both in the Dolby Auditorium where the Oscars were occurring and on the internet, where film geeks and casual viewers alike were gripped with speculation over what had just happened. Was it a calculated stunt? Actual mayhem unfolding before our very eyes? A routine Oscars ceremony had suddenly been turned into one for the history books. It was a remarkable night…but also not the first time a snafu like this had happened at the Academy Awards. Decades earlier, Sammy Davis Jr. had his own mix-up involving the wrong Academy Award winner getting announced…though it didn’t quite reach the legendary status of the La La Land/Moonlight mix-up.
Sammy Davis Jr. Called the Wrong Best Music Score for an Adaptation Winner
It's April 13, 1964. The 36th Academy Awards are being held in Santa Monica, California and Tom Jones, 8 1/2, Hud, How the West Was Won, and so many more are nominated. Jack Lemmon is hosting and for a little while, things seem to be going smoothly. Then, as recounted by outlets like Variety, something went wrong when Sammy Davis Jr. went up to deliver the winner for the category for Best Music Score for an Adaptation or Treatment. Here, Hollywood legend Davis Jr. declared to the world that John Addison had won this award for his work on Tom Jones. Conceptually, that would make sense since Tom Jones would end up winning Best Picture that evening after scoring a slew of other Oscars.
The only problem here, though, was that Addison wasn't nominated in this category! His compositions for Tom Jones were in the Best Music Score - Substantially Original category alongside the scores for 1963 movies like Cleopatra and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. That year's Best Scoring of Music - Adaptation or Treatment category was actually devoid of any Best Picture nominees (even the George Bruns score for Disney's forgettable The Sword in the Stone secured a nod among this crop). The actual winner was Andre Previn for his score on Irma la Douce, a Billy Wilder film starring that year's Oscars host, Jack Lemmon. Someone had given Sammy Davis Jr. the wrong envelope!
Shortly after he delivered the wrong winner, there was an almost immediate correction, with Davis Jr. following up this revelation with the now iconic line "wait till the NAACP hears about this!" After vowing to get the proper winner announced this go-around, Sammy Davis Jr. had no problem declaring Previn’s victory in this category. From there, the rest of the 36th Academy Awards moved on quite smoothly.Tom Jones secured its Best Picture trophy, and the temporary snafu would occasionally get joked about in public events that Sammy Davis Jr. attended. Though a notable mistake, it’s clear this incident didn’t take on anywhere near the notoriety of the later La La Land/Moonlight snafu that defined the 89th Academy Awards.
'La La Land's Oscar Mix-Up Had a Bigger Impact on Hollywood
It doesn’t take a lot of investigation to figure out why one of these Oscars messes has become so much more infamous than the other. For one thing, the Sammy Davis Jr. boondoggle occurred with one of two Best Score categories at the 36th Academy Awards, neither of which are as high-profile categories as the Best Picture section. That’s not a comment on the “importance” of film scores (one of the most integral elements of any motion picture), but rather an objective reflection on which Oscars categories generate the most discourse. People will throw themselves on a grenade for certain Best Picture nominees, but it’s rare for the works of Ennio Morricone to generate the same level of constant passion from the general public. This facet of reality ensured that a Best Picture mix-up would become more notorious than a Best Score mess.
This Comedian Was Awarded the Only Wooden Oscar Statue
Sometimes, the Academy has a sense of humor.Then there are the circumstances surrounding the Best Picture disaster versus Sammy Davis Jr.’s brief faux pas. The latter incident got resolved quite quickly since the intial annoucned winner wasn’t even nominated, and everyone immediately realized something screwy was going on. There was no chance for the wrong person to take the stage and secure the award. By contrast, in the La La Land/Moonlight scenario, the three La La Land producers took the stage and each gave acceptance speeches before the problem was resolved. People were already adjusting to the idea of La La Land becoming the latest in a long line of Best Picture Oscar winners when suddenly the ground shifted under everyone’s feet.
While Sammy Davis Jr. wrung an amusing reference to the NAACP out of his Oscars mix-up, it couldn’t hold a candle to the iconic moments of the La La Land/Moonlight fiasco, like Horowitz holding up the proper envelope to the camera or the Moonlight winners scrambling to the stage. Plus, occurring in the age of social media allowed the more recent Oscar slip-up to take on an extra degree of personal ownership with people. It wasn’t just that they were watching it unfold on live television, but they could make memes related to their unspeakable shock over this entire event or latch onto other celebrities live-reacting to every second on Twitter. There was a special level of immersiveness to an Oscars mistake happening in the modern world that made the La La Land/Moonlight debacle particularly iconic.
