Last night, Faye Dunaway went on NBC Nightly News for her first official interview since she erroneously declared La La Land the winner of this year’s Academy Award for Best Picture. (The award actually went to Moonlight, in case you’ve been cryogenically frozen for the past few months.) And, given some time to process the evening’s events, Dunaway had a more eloquent response than her reported quip at the Vanity Fair Oscars party: “I really fucked that up.”
Naturally, she’s still embarrassed about the incident, which presumably everyone from her agent to her mail carrier has been pointedly not mentioning until they just can’t help it anymore over the past few months. “I thought, ‘I could have done something, surely,’” Dunaway told NBC’s Lester Holt, after saying that she felt “very guilty” after the ceremony. “Why didn’t I see Emma Stone’s name on the top of the card?”
Perhaps, Dunaway suggests, it’s because it’s hard to tell when Warren Beatty is fucking with you. She claims that she assumed Beatty was joking when he pulled out the card and looked around with what she thought was faux confusion. According to her account, “I finally said, ‘You’re impossible,’” and she read the movie title on the card, not noticing Emma Stone’s name at the top in her frustration. “I thought he was joking. I mean, I thought he was stalling. Warren’s like that. He kind of holds the power and makes you wait … but it’s part of his charm,” she adds, with the measured air of someone who has been putting up with someone else’s shit—and giving interviews about it—for going on 50 years.
Despite the miscommunication between Dunaway and her Bonnie And Clyde co-star, she and Beatty were immediately cleared of responsibility for the snafu, which was ultimately blamed on a PricewatershouseCooper accountant who was too busy tweeting about how excited he was to be handing out envelopes at the Oscars to hand out those envelopes correctly.