On Monday morning, after the historic Oscars' fiasco, we highlighted a recent Financial News interview with Brian Cullinan, the Matt Damon-lookalike Pricewaterhouse Coopers accountant who was quickly singled out as responsible for the award screw up, in which he said that “as long as our relationship is good and strong and we do a good job, which we always do, the Academy has been pleased, I think, with how we’ve been involved. It’s such a long-term relationship that we know intricately how everything works, the timing of it, the process that we use, and they have absolute trust in us and what we do.”
PwC accountants Brian Cullinan and Martha Ruiz
And while the Academy may still have trust in PwC (if hardly absolute), its faith in Cullinan - the official scapegoat for Sunday night's historic debacle as well as his assistant - has run out. According to Reuters, the organizers of the Academy Awards said on Wednesday that the two PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants behind the mix up that saw "La La Land" incorrectly named best picture before "Moonlight" was declared the real winner, will not work the Oscars ceremony again.
A spokesperson for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences said PwC accountants Brian Cullinan and Martha Ruiz will no longer tabulate Oscar votes and hand out envelopes containing winners' names at Hollywood's most prestigious awards ceremony. Meanwhile, in what may or may not be even greater humiliation for PwC, so far no decision has been announced by the organization on whether it will continue its partnership with PwC, which has handled the Oscar tabulation process for 83 years.
A PwC spokesman said Wednesday that Cullinan and Ruiz were still employed as partners at the accounting firm, which had earlier taken full responsibility for the gaffe that stunned the Dolby Theatre crowd in Hollywood and a television audience worldwide. The mishap was unprecedented for the usually meticulously choreographed ceremony and stole the spotlight from the winners.
A day after the incident, the Academy and apologized to all affected, including presenters Beatty and Dunaway, and said it will "determine what actions are appropriate going forward."
PwC said Cullinan had mistakenly handed presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, who were announcing the best picture winner, the back-up envelope for Actress in a Leading Role instead of the envelope for Best Picture. "Once the error occurred, protocols for correcting it were not followed through quickly enough by Mr. Cullinan or his partner," the accounting firm said in a statement.
Cullinan had posted a now-deleted backstage photo of actress Emma Stone after she won her best actress Oscar on Twitter minutes before the mix-up. As a result, he may be the most prominent professional casualty of a vanity tweet in history.