Smörgåsbord: Award Show Scandals

Every year, media award shows like the Grammys, Emmys, and Oscars recognize the hard work put into a wide array of diverse movies, TV shows, songs, and albums. However, no event is perfect, and the mass anticipation for each show ensures that every rare on-stage slip-up is bound to make headlines is made that much more memorable when it occurs. With the 2018 Academy Awards having just recently passed, here’s a quick highlight reel of some of the most famous fumbles forever enshrined in award show history.

La La Land Smörgåsbord: Award Show Scandals

graphic by Amanda Shi An Oscar is one of the highest honors possible for a work of media. And of course, the more serious the award, the more shocking the slip-up, and there can be no greater (and thus unforgettable) mistake in an Oscars award show than presenting the wrong winner. In an absolutely unprecedented, history-making moment at the 89th Academy Awards, La La Land Smörgåsbord: Award Show Scandals

was mistakenly called as winner of Best Picture. An envelope mix-up was to blame for starting the misunderstanding; the Best Actress in a Leading Role envelope had somehow been swapped with the Best Picture envelope. Warren Beatty had known something was wrong when he opened the card and read ‘Emma Stone, La La Land’, but he hadn’t known how to respond to such an unexpected scenario. In his confusion, he attempted to stall for time by pausing in between words, but both the audience and his co-presenter Faye Dunaway interpreted it as him deliberately building suspense. When Dunaway prodded him to stop playing coy for fear of an impatient audience, Beatty surrendered the decision along with the card over to her; she quickly assumed that the printed movie must be the winner. Neither once considered that the person listed beside the movie might be the true winner, just of a different trophy. Astonished, La La Land directors and starring artists joined the stage to receive their awards. Embarrassment and mass-bewilderment was in store all- around when, mid-speech, they were interrupted by a headset-wearing man who proffered the correct envelope, naming Moonlight as the actual winner of Best Picture. The La La Land producers themselves announced the mistake, showing the astonished crowd the card for proof, and inviting the Moonlight crew on stage to retrieve their awards. The Moonlight crew reciprocated their gratitude towards La La Land, mentioning in their speech that La La Land deserved the award as much as they did.

Grammys Smörgåsbord: Award Show Scandals

graphic by Amanda Shi The music industry is a living machine, taking in talent and putting out songs to delight and amuse their audience. Its lifeblood, therefore, are the fans who voraciously consume and eagerly await new releases by their loyal favorites, recommended newcomers, or completely unknown dark horses. With the advent of the Internet age, video-accompanied song releases Smörgåsbord: Award Show Scandals

have become the new norm, meant to enhance the listening experience for the faithful fans by offering a complementary (and complimentary) visual component. At the annual MTV Video Music Awards, a music video-specific award show especially known for its younger generation target audience, nominated compositions are graded in categories like “Best Pop”, “Song of Summer”, and “Artist of the Year”. Since 2006, fans have had an active role in the decision-making process through online voting access. The winner is honored with a silver “moonman” trophy, modeled after one of the earliest MTV symbols; however, not everyone always agrees with what the fans declare. During the 2009 VMAs, when Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” won Best Female Video, her acceptance speech was interrupted by rapper Kanye West. He’d joined her on the stage and waited for a pause in her speech, before unexpectedly taking the microphone from her to say, “Taylor, I’m really happy for you. I’ll let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time! One of the best videos of all time!” The camera panned to Beyonce, who looked just as astonished as everybody else. After a moment of stunned disbelief, where the crowd waited uneasily for a punchline that was never to come, an immense outpouring of anger manifested in West’s being booed off stage. Immediately after the event, a host of celebrities took to Twitter to express their collective condemnation of his actions. West later apologized to Swift through his blog, and the young singer’s first VMA acceptance speech eventually did reach fruition, after Beyonce herself invited her on-stage to do so during her own recognition for Video of the Year.

Mispronunciations Smörgåsbord: Award Show Scandals Smörgåsbord: Award Show Scandals

graphic by Amanda Shi Names can be difficult to pronounce sometimes, especially when different language conventions are taken into account. However, at the 66th Emmys in 2014, when presenting the award for Outstanding Variety Series to Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report, singer- songwriter Gwen Stefani chose a particularly unusual interpretation of ‘Colbert’: “Col-bore”, instead of the correct “Col-bear”, or even the common alternative “Col-bert”, which Colbert’s own father had chosen to use. Luckily, comedian Jimmy Fallon was there to kindly hop on stage and offer a distraction. Another memorable mark in mispronunciation history involved Disney animated blockbuster Frozen, whose defining song “Let It Go” had already achieved fame prior to the 2014 Oscars. Its singer-artist Idina Menzel had her name spectacularly botched by John Travolta in her Oscar nomination introduction, which he pronounced “Adele Dazeem”, which held little to no resemblance to the original name and promptly produced a meme that briefly trended on the Internet: “Travoltify Your Name”.Menzel, however, didn’t appear to be affected by the mangling of her name, calmly going on to win Best Original Song. However, a year later, at the 2015 Academy Awards, when it came her turn to introduce nominations for Best Original Song, Menzel proved she hadn’t entirely forgiven and forgotten the incident by her sly, deliberate mispronunciation of John Travolta as Glom Gazingo.