In an increasingly grim and cheerless world, you have to take your pleasure where you find it. And the unanticipated spectacle of the world's most famous awards ceremony going arse-up was always going to deliver this vexed planet an intoxicating shot of pure dopamine.
But the real reason for the international orgy of schadenfreude that still shows no sign of abating is simple: IT WAS THE ACCOUNTANT'S FAULT, AND WE CAN PROVE IT.
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Is this the most awkward government ad ever?
Meet 'The Game Changers': The Department of Finance has produced a stilted, clumsy and awkward recruitment ad designed to draw new talent into their graduate program.
Never before, in the history of financial services, has an accounting professional ever been so bang-to-rights on an issue that any Normal Human Idiot is capable of understanding.
Never again will we non-accountants be able to prove – with pictures – that an accountant buggered something up in a way that was exhilaratingly, indisputably NOT OUR FAULT.
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This is a significant moment for homo sapiens, seeing as the crimes of accountants are ordinarily either a) so labyrinthine that one's natural pleasurable sense of outrage is obliged to cool its heels for eight years while the Federal Court works out who did what, or b) so stickily enmeshed with the moral failings of their clients that it's hard to hold the pen-pusher solely responsible.
Not this time, Jack.
"The Twit Who Blew The Oscars" is how the New York Post, the next day, described PricewaterhouseCoopers partner Brian Cullinan, the poor tuxedoed chipmunk who handed Warren Beatty the wrong envelope at the crucial moment.
"And The Loser Is…" sassed the Daily News, over an unflattering picture of the self-same chap.
Forensic social media investigators quickly established that Cullinan had – in the minutes before the disaster – not been concentrating his fearsome auditorial capacities and organisational skills on the solemn task at hand, as claimed in a series of self-aggrandising interviews he had conducted before the ceremony (now prudently scrubbed from the internet).
Instead, photographic evidence from backstage reveals he had been engaging in the rather more mortal activities of perving at Emma Stone and tweeting his heart out, while casually holding a sheaf of red envelopes in his left hand as though they were flyers for his new paleo cafe.
The firm copped it sweet more or less straight away.
"For the past 83 years, the academy has entrusted PwC with the integrity of the awards process during the ceremony, and last night we failed the academy," a public statement confirmed.
"He feels very, very terrible and horrible," PwC's US chairman, Tim Ryan, told Variety. "He is very upset about this mistake. And it is also my mistake, our mistake, and we all feel very bad."
For those who view their accountants with a mixture of fear, guilt and inadequacy, this orgy of self-flagellation was pretty intoxicating stuff.
The customary role of accountants is to point out to the rest of us where we're going wrong, and to exercise the gentle superiority of the person who not only understands amortisation but will probably attempt to explain it if not physically stopped.
I found my own accountant, Keith, 18 years ago when – searching for someone to help me with six outstanding tax returns – I simply asked the most administratively useless journalist I knew who his accountant was. When he replied, "Keith," I knew I had my man. (It's important to me not to be the biggest idiot on the client list.)
Keith is a wonderful, patient, principled man who is always trying to improve my understanding of depreciation, and deals manfully year after year with my passive refusal to record claimable kilometres.
I feel, in some obscure way, as if what happened at the Oscars has nudged our hitherto profound power imbalance back towards me by a whisker.
In Australia, of course, this Revenge On The Nerds did not stop with the Academy Awards.
Having luxuriated in the spectacle of finance geeks buggering up the film industry's night of nights, Australian taxpayers were additionally blessed on Wednesday by the widespread circulation of the Department of Finance's new recruitment video, an eye-peelingly awful demonstration of what happens when finance geeks actually make movies.
Like Showgirls, the 1995 Paul Verhoeven film that was so elaborately bad that it popped out the other side to become a cult classic, one suspects that the Department of Finance video (with its earnest and racially diverse characters popping out for banana bread and enthusing about supporting the modernisation program across government) will trigger a tsunami of ironic hyper-numerate recruits.
At which point, fellow humans, we will be in serious peril.
The financial services world is highly unlikely to let the events of the past week go unavenged.
The Empire must strike back. So, Normal Human Idiots, get your affairs together. Find those receipts. Buy one of those "Superannuation For Dummies" books. Keep a contemporaneous logbook of all transactions. Because we're all about to be audited to within an inch of our stupid lives.
Annabel Crabb is an ABC writer and broadcaster. Twitter: annabelcrabb
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