A highlight of most award shows, at least for CPAs, is not necessarily who won what or what they were wearing, but rather those 30 seconds of fame for the CPAs featured on stage during the national broadcast. Most years the CPAs wave from the stage, sporting briefcases embossed with their firm’s name.
Brian Cullinan, partner and accountant at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) botched the meticulous procedure for announcing the Oscar for best picture when he handed victory to “La La Land” instead of “Moonlight” the real winner, at the Academy Awards on Sunday.
The Wall Street Journal reported Cullinan had been tweeting backstage shortly before he gave presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway the wrong envelope for the movie industry's top award.
The mistake stunned the live theatre crowd in Hollywood and a worldwide television audience. “Cullinan mistakenly handed the back-up envelope for Actress in a Leading Role instead of the envelope for Best Picture” to Warren Beatty, PwC said.
The mistake was not rectified until the “La La Land” cast and producers were on stage giving their acceptance speeches. “La La Land”’s producer, Jordan Horowitz, announced the error two precious minutes later.
“Guys, guys, I'm sorry. No. There's a mistake,” Horowitz said. “’Moonlight,’ you guys won best picture. This is not a joke."
It took three hours for (PwC), which has been overseeing Academy Awards balloting for 83 years, initially to confirm that Beatty and Dunaway received the wrong category envelope.
An embarrassed Warren Beatty carried the envelope after the show, with the writing clearly saying “actress in a leading role.” “La La Land” star Stone had been awarded that Oscar moments before.
Brand management experts said it could take years for PwC to recover. Rueters news service quoted Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University, who said the blunder was a, “bit of a branding tragedy.”
“This is not advanced math. PwC had to get the right name in the right envelope and get it to the right person,” he said.
Under a PwC procedure, just two accountants know the names of the 24 winners after their names are placed in two sets of sealed envelopes. The two accountants also memorize the winning names.
The envelopes are taken separately in two briefcases to the Academy Awards venue. The two accountants - in this case Brian Cullinan and Martha Ruiz – drive separately, in case of an accident or traffic delays. The pair stand off stage at opposite sides and hand envelopes to the respective presenters as each category is announced.
Cullinan turns out to be a Harley-riding accountant who’s been handling Oscar ballots and part of the “leadership balloting team” since 2014. He is a Malibu resident, married with grown children. He is the lead partner for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, including the annual balloting for the Academy Awards and managing partner for the company’s Southern California practice.
Cullinan’s first year doing the Oscar counting was in 2014. He told Time Magazine in a feature about the job, “Especially for those who aren’t in the business world, [the Oscars are] what [PriceWaterhouseCooper’s] known for. To be asked to do it is probably, as an accountant, as much fun as you can have.”
Interestingly Neil Patrick Harris said to Cullinan onstage during the Academy Awards in 2015 that he looked similar to Matt Damon. This was echoed by Michael Strahan in 2016.
According to his LinkedIn page, Cullinan is a graduate of Cornell University, where he majored in psychology, and of Northwestern University, where he switched over to accounting as part of the Graduate School of Professional Accounting. “I first decided to study accounting when I saw how difficult the job market was after college. Having an interest in business, I learned that accounting is the foundation and the language of all business and that I needed that background first to quickly land a job, and then, to begin a career.” After earning his master’s degree, he went on to get his CPA license and never looked back.
A source told PEOPLE magazine Cullinan was asked not to tweet during the Oscars, and that tending to the envelopes “was to be his only focus.”
According to Variety magazine Cullinan tweeted just three minutes before he erroneously handed Beatty the backup Best Actress envelope instead of the Best Picture envelope. Cullinan reportedly issued several tweets on Sunday, including one congratulating Best Supporting Actress winner Viola Davis and an image of the briefcase in the car with him on the way to the red carpet. These tweets have since been deleted.
PwC encouraged people to follow Cullinan and balloting co-leader Martha Ruiz on Twitter on their “Journey to the Oscars” web page — and before the show promoted a “briefcase journey” on its corporate Twitter page, which showed the bag in various locations around the country in the weeks leading up to the show.
In a Huffington Post interview before the broadcast, Cullinan spoke about what would happen if a presenter declared a false winner.
“We would make sure that the correct person was known very quickly,” Cullinan said. “Whether that entails stopping the show, us walking onstage, us signaling to the stage manager — that’s really a game-time decision, if something like that were to happen. Again, it’s so unlikely.”
Although PwC probably tried to make too much hay out of this assignment, embarrassed CPAs can watch some of the cast of “The Big Bang Theory” take a creative approach to acknowledging the CPAs who tabulate and guard the Emmy votes. When CPAs got special treatment and admiration from “The Big Bang Theory” character Sheldon Cooper chanting: “CPA! CPA! CPA!”
See more at: http://blog.aicpa.org/2012/09/cpas-win-big-at-the-emmys.html#sthash.P1SIiUDJ.dpbs
Comments powered by CComment