Wednesday, July 8, 2026

Oscar Disaster: Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway Were Not to Blame for Public Fiasco

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I’m writing at 3am after a great Oscar telecast and a weird weird night.

First of all, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were not to blame for the public fiasco of the wrong movie being called for Best Picture.

The blame lies with the production people and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Beatty was given the wrong envelope, a duplicate of Emma Stone’s winning one. He didn’t know what was going on and deferred to Dunaway, who just winged it.

Faye told me at Vanity Fair’s insanely celebrity packed after party: “I’m not to blame!” And she’s right.

So many people at the Vanity Fair party were Monday morning quarterbacking the whole event. But really, when you’re on live TV, at the end of a four hour show, with no food or drink, you do exactly what Bonnie and Clyde did: you just do it to get it over with.

More later today about all the parties, and everything that happened off screen…

 

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Roger Friedman
Roger Friedman
Roger Friedman is the founder and editor-in-chief of Showbiz411. He wrote the FOX411 column on FoxNews.com from 1999 to 2009, where he covered Michael Jackson, and previously wrote the "Intelligencer" column at New York magazine in the mid-1990s, where he covered the O.J. Simpson trial. He also edited Fame magazine. His bylines have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, Vogue, Details, and the Miami Herald. He is a voting member of the Critics Choice Awards (Film and Television branches), and his movie reviews are tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. With D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, he co-produced the 2002 documentary "Only the Strong Survive," which screened at Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.

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