Personal recollection of Oscar night mishap and party circuit

Four security guards escorted me there. By the time Marc and | met again at the end of the three prong red carpet, "La La Land" publicist and West Coast campaign queen Lisa Taback was furious I’d told the shaken producer his film might lose. | said, "Kelly Bush said that, not me." But | felt terrible. Sure enough, the “La La” landslide never happened. It did win a spectacular six Oscars before Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway walked to center stage for the best picture finale. | was now standing against the wall at the first row of the first balcony. Lionsgate publicists Julie Fontaine and Jennifer Peterson, both dressed in haute couture gowns and borrowed emeralds, anxiously insisted | join their good luck group hug as best picture was announced. Despite my faux pas, and my work on most of the year’s top films, including “Moonlight,” “Manchester by the Sea” and “Hidden Figures,” Oscar night | was in the “La La” camp due to my long friendship with it’s director Damien Chazelle. So we three bejeweled broads were hugging tightly, wnen Faye broke Warren’s pregnant pause and screamed "La La Land". The girls cried, the “La La” producers ran to the stage and | was thinking about how to apologize to Marc Platt as he thanked his family. Then, the stage filled up with men in headsets. Producer Jordan Horowitz, the class act of the evening, grabbed the right card and calmly announced "Moonlight. No Joke." Platt, Horowitz and their co-producer Fred Berger handed their Oscars to Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, and producers Jeremy Kleiner and Adele Romanski and left the stage as Mahershala Ali, the first Muslim actor to get the gold guy, joined the cast waving his historic Oscar. Julie and Jennifer ran to Soho House to oversee Lionsgate's victory party, where hundreds of confused well-wishers waited to celebrate the “La La” wins, including Emma Stone’s best actress, Justin Hurwitz’s best score, and Benj Pasek, Justin Paul and Justin Hurwitz’s best song for “City of Stars.” At 32, Damien Chazelle also made history as the youngest best director ever. Some, lacking any empathy for the winners and losers onstage, called this historic screw-up "great live-television.” But standing in the balcony, alone and speechless, all | could think was, “How did | miss this?” | ran to the Governor's Ball, which is the next stop for winners on their busy night. They get their statues engraved there before they drop by their studio’s party, get photographed, Oscar in hand at Vanity Fair’s fete, wall-to-wall with celebrities, and then head to Guy Oseary's home high in Beverly Hills to rock-and-roll ‘till dawn. At the entrance to the Governor's Ball, Warren Beatty walked up to me, still holding the two priceless envelopes as proof of his innocence. | asked him, "What happened?" His phone rang. It was so noisy, he bent toward me to hear better. The phone was almost in my face and | heard Annette Benning asking where he was and saying, "Warren, come home." Warren said, "No. | have done nothing wrong." Warren's wonderful film, "Rules Don't Apply" received little Academy love, yet he was generous enough to show up. Now, fifty years after “Bonnie and Clyde,” he was in the Oscar spotlight again, the latest unwitting star of Oscar’s all-time blooper reel. As Jimmy Kimmel said, “We don’t have to watch reality shows anymore because we are living in one.” Here’s reality-show Oscar week as | lived it: Tuesday, February 21st HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019850