Oscars officials have been investigating an embarrassing mix-up over the best picture award, which eventually went to coming-of-age drama Moonlight, after a ceremony studded with political jokes and minor mishaps.
In a mistake that stunned the Dolby Theatre crowd in Hollywood and a television audience worldwide, presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway at first said the winner was romantic musical La La Land, the presumed best picture favourite.
As both films' casts stood awkwardly on stage, Beatty explained he had received the wrong envelope.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which oversees the ballots, confirmed the error on Monday (AEDT).
"We are currently investigating how this could have happened, and deeply regret that this occurred," the professional services firm said in a statement while apologising to Moonlight, La La Land, Beatty, Dunaway and Oscars viewers.
How the system is supposed to work
Two PwC accountants, Brian Cullinan and Martha Ruiz, are tasked with holding all 24 winner envelopes during the ceremony, according to an article in Medium published before the show.
The pair was to stand on either side of the stage, off-screen, and hand envelopes to the respective presenters.
Just days before the Oscars, Cullinan told the Huffington Post in an interview that the procedure for dealing with the hand-off of an incorrect envelope, other than signalling to a stage manager, was unclear.
"It's so unlikely," Cullinan told the Huffington Post.
Emma Stone, who won the best actress award for her La La Land role as a struggling actress, asked reporters backstage: "Is that the craziest Oscar moment of all time?"
The Wall Street Journal and celebrity website TMZ.com reported that Cullinan had posted a backstage photo of Stone on Twitter minutes before the mix-up.
The photo was later deleted but was still viewable on Tuesday on a cached archive of the page.
Is PwC now the Tiger Woods of accounting firms?
For London-headquartered PwC, it is anything but funny.
According to Nigel Currie, an independent London-based branding specialist with decades' worth of industry experience, this mistake was "as bad a mess-up as you could imagine."
Brands go to extraordinary lengths to protect their image and reputation and to be seen as good corporate citizens.
History is littered by examples when a hard-won reputation nosedives, from sporting legends Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong to business giants like BP following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster and Volkswagen after its emissions cheating scandal.
Crisis managers say PwC has no other option than to front-up immediately and explain exactly what happened to contain the damage to its reputation and brand and plot a way forward where there is no repeat.
Oscars shock as La La Land mistakenly named best picture...
Not the only stuff-up of the night
While the best picture mix-up took top spot in the evening's embarrassments, the ceremony was beset with smaller blunders.
During the In Memoriam segment, the name of celebrated Australian costume designer Janet Patterson, who died last year, was accompanied by a photo of Jan Chapman, an Australian movie producer who is alive and well.
Also, Auli'i Cravalho, the 16-year-old actress and lead voice in Disney's animated film Moana, was struck on the head with a flag waved by a backup dancer while performing the best song-nominated How Far I'll Go.
Moonlight, a tale about a young boy struggling with poverty and his sexuality in Miami, also brought a supporting actor Oscar for first-timer Mahershala Ali.
Viola Davis won for her supporting role as a long-suffering housewife in African-American family drama Fences.
The recognition for both the actors and their films was a stark contrast to the 2016 Academy Awards, when no actors of colour were even nominated.
Moonlight producer Adele Romanski said she hoped the movie would inspire "little black boys and brown girls and other folks watching at home who feel marginalised".
President Trump cops it amid messages of tolerance
The best picture mistake during Hollywood's biggest night seemed to eclipse the prior three hours of a show peppered with jokes about US President Donald Trump, capping an awards season marked by celebrities' fiery protests against his policies.
Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel fired off political zingers and even tweeted at the Republican president, getting no immediate response.
Several celebrities wore blue ribbons on Sunday in support of the American Civil Liberties Union advocacy group, which worked to get Mr Trump's bid to ban travellers from seven majority-Muslim nations blocked in US courts.
But for the most part, the speeches were mild or made general pleas for tolerance rather than direct attacks on Mr Trump.
Iranian director Asghar Farhadi was an exception. His drama The Salesman was named best foreign-language film, but Farhadi boycotted the ceremony because of Mr Trump's travel ban.
In a speech given on his behalf by Iranian-American space expert Anousheh Ansari, Farhadi said his absence was due to "an inhumane law that bans entry into the US … dividing the world into the 'us' and 'our enemies' categories creates fear, a deceitful justification for aggression and war".
The US State Department on Tuesday issued and then deleted a congratulatory message for Farhadi's Oscar win.
Reuters/AP
