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Oscar Notebook

Chrissy Teigen, left, and John Legend arrive at the Oscars on Sunday, Feb. 26, 2017, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)

Is that a joke?

The best picture Oscar blunder prompted snickering from Ryan Gosling and a cascade of politically tinged jokes on Twitter, with some even declaring Hillary Clinton the winner. Billy Crystal tweeted : “Amazing ending. Wish that had happened on Election Day.” Seth MacFarlane chimed in : “You know what the problem is — millions of Academy members voted illegally.” The sarcasm started after “La La Land” was wrongly announced as the best picture winner. The actual winner was “Moonlight,” drawing a giggle from Gosling, who was on stage with the “La La Land” cast when the real winner was announced. Memes using the Oscar winner envelope held up by “La La Land” producer Jordan Horowitz were edited to instead show titles of films that have garnered little attention from the Academy, including “Ernest Goes to Camp” and “Space Jam.” Other memes showed the popular vote totals for the recent U.S. presidential election, with Clinton tallying more ballots than President Donald Trump. Another displayed a photo of Russian President Vladmir Putin, comically suggesting there was some sort of hacking involved in what’s become known as #envelopegate and #oscarsfail. The sports world dished out a few of its own jabs at the expense of the Oscars snafu. Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers tweeted : “Derek Zoolander is smiling somewhere.” And the Twitter account for the Oklahoma City Thunder repeated the final score of their win Sunday night, saying #nochange.

Cutest couples

John Legend and Chrissy Teigen (pictured) were mutually doting at Sunday’s ceremony. Before the show began, Legend told his wife, “You look so pretty,” before tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. Once the show began, Teigen noticed that Ryan Gosling was walking behind her and Legend toward the green room. “Your best friend’s behind you,” Teigen told her husband. “John drops your name every time,” she said to Gosling, who blushed but blew it off. Legend insisted that he had to change clothes to perform his “La La Land” medley, but Teigen convinced him to get a cocktail first. “Let’s get a drink, then change and go pee,” she offered, and Legend followed her to the green room. Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann are also in the running for cutest Oscar couple. Apatow accompanied his wife backstage as she prepared for her Oscar moment: introducing the film academy’s scientific and technical winners. Apatow handed her a bottle of water with straw in it and kissed her cheek before she took the stage. Then he documented her big moment, capturing cellphone footage while she was onstage. When she finished her lines and returned backstage, Apatow told her, “That was great!”

Valuable DNA

After his show-opening performance, Justin Timberlake dropped by Kelly Ripa’s backstage set. He chatted about his Oscar number and upcoming projects, leaving behind a small plastic cup he’d sipped from during the taping. After he left the interview space, Ripa said: “We’re going to auction this off on eBay. This was Justin’s cup.” Though he was already walking away, Timberlake made an abrupt turn to collect his refuse, saying, “I’ll take that.” The cup hasn’t yet shown up on eBay.

32.9 million watch

The 32.9 million viewers tuning into Sunday’s Academy Awards represented a drop-off of more than a million from last year and Oscar’s smallest audience since 2008. The Nielsen company said Monday that viewership dipped notably from the 34.3 million who watched the ABC telecast in 2016. In 2008, just 32 million viewers tuned in. The ceremony, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, maintained a political edge as many winners, presenters and Kimmel himself took repeated digs at President Donald Trump. An anti-Trump sentiment was hardly unexpected after the politically charged atmosphere of the Golden Globes, which aired in early January with a number of onstage voices, particularly Meryl Streep’s, taking to task the then-president-elect. After that, some Trump supporters called for a viewer boycott of the Oscarcast, which may have partly accounted for the audience’s fall-off from last year. But audience erosion has been Oscar’s trend for three years straight. In both 2014 and 2013, the awards show reached more than 40 million viewers, whereas 37.3 million were watching in 2015.

In memoriam snub

Actress Patricia Arquette says she was upset the Oscars left her transgender sister out of the “In Memoriam” tribute. Arquette told ABC News she thought the Academy Awards “would have a little bit more respect” for the transgender community. Arquette says her sister Alexis Arquette should have been honored because she had a great body of work and was one of few transgender artists in the business. Alexis Arquette died Sept. 11 from a heart attack and battled HIV for 29 years. She memorably played a trans sex worker in “Last Exit to Brooklyn” and a Boy George impersonator in “The Wedding Singer.” The “In Memoriam” portion of the show remembers major Hollywood film figures who died last year. This year’s segment included Debbie Reynolds, Carrie Fisher and Gene Wilder. Others left out included Florence Henderson and Garry Shandling. And the “In Memoriam” segment included a notable gaffe when Jan Chapman’s photo was shown with the name of Janet Patterson, an Australian costume designer who died in 2015.

Harvey empathizes

If Warren Beatty needs someone to talk to following Sunday night’s epic award mix-up at Sunday night’s Oscars, Steve Harvey is open ears. While hosting the Miss Universe pageant in 2015, Harvey accidently named the wrong woman as the winner during the live broadcast. Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel mentioned Harvey’s mistake after an apparent envelope mix-up led Beatty and co-presenter Faye Dunaway to hand out the best picture award to “La La Land” instead of the real winner, “Moonlight.” Harvey joked Monday on Twitter that he went to sleep early and asked if he missed anything. He later added : “Call me Warren Beatty. I can help you get through this!”

Teenage dream

Sixteen-year-old Auli’I Cravalho, who voices the title character in “Moana,” made her stage debut in front of an audience of billions Sunday. Before Cravalho took the stage to sing “How Far I’ll Go,” from the film, songwriter Miranda introduced her performance with an original rap. He stayed in the wings of the stage to watch her performance on a monitor. When she finished the song flawlessly, Miranda clapped, jumped and shouted, “Wow.” Cravalho got more kudos after coming offstage. She passed Janelle Monae in the hallway, who told her, “You’re beautiful, and you’re darling, too.”

The smoking gun?

Moments before he handed out the wrong envelope in one of the worst gaffes in Academy Award history, PwC accountant Brian Cullinan tweeted a behind-the-scenes photo of winner Emma Stone holding her statuette. “Best Actress Emma Stone backstage!” the tweet read. It’s one potential clue in the whodunit that Sunday’s ceremony became after presenters Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty mistakenly proclaimed “La La Land” as the best-picture winner instead of “Moonlight.” Cullinan was one of two accountants for PwC, formerly Price Waterhouse Coopers, tasked with doling out the envelopes containing winners’ names to the presenters. But the envelope that Cullinan gave to Dunaway and Beatty was a duplicate of the previously announced win for Stone, not for best picture. The photo tweeted by Cullinan, which was first reported Monday by The Wall Street Journal, would have been taken in the minutes leading up to the top picture award — raising the question of whether the accountant was distracted from the task at hand. Although the tweet had been deleted from the social media site, a copy of it was kept by Google and available through a cache page. A PwC representative declined comment Monday on whether Cullinan’s social-media use might have contributed to the fiasco that launched countless punchlines, memes and a probe of what went wrong.

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