The mix-up at the end of the 2017 Academy Award Ceremony took everyone by surprise but that wasn’t the first big surprise of the night. Sure award shows are typically just extravagant self-congratulatory BS but this is the Academy Awards—it’s been around since the silent film era. After 89 years, you’d think there’d be no more surprises but that’s definitely not the case.  

In Memoriam Segment Shows Image of Producer Who is Very Much Alive

Jan Chapman is an Australian film producer who whose image appeared in the In Memoriam segment along with the name Janet Patterson, an Australian costume designer.

Patterson had been nominated for an Academy Award four times before she died in October and while her name appeared on the screen, her face did not. Chapman told Variety in an email that she was “devastated” by the use of her image in the place Patterson who she called her “long-time collaborator.”

Suicide Squad is an Academy Award Winning Movie

Ever since those stories began to come out about Jared Leto terrorizing his female co-workers on the set of Suicide Squad with dead pigs, used condoms, and live rats in an attempt at “method acting”, it was pretty obvious that the movie was going to be a major camp-fest.

The movie faired pretty well commercially but it was destroyed by the critics which makes you wonder how a film so terrible could ever win an Academy Award. Sure, the award was only for best makeup and hairstyling which is one of the most boring awards of the night but the fact that Suicide Squad is forever cemented in history as being an Oscar-winning movie is more terrifying than any of Leto’s disgusting “pranks”.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the First Movie in the Harry Potter Franchise to win an Academy Award

The new Harry Potter movie is a period film so that requires a lot of costumes. However, the award should not, necessarily, go to the film with the most costumes or even the most elaborate costumes. Colleen Atwood won for her costume design for Fantastic Beasts which came as a surprise considering that multiple Harry Potter films have been nominated for Academy Awards but have never won.

If Mary Zophres had won, La La Land could have been the first contemporary film in 22 years to win an Oscar in that category. Of course, in true Oscar fashion, they chose the movie with the extravagant period costumes. This win probably wouldn’t be such a disappointment had Fantastic Beasts not been an even bigger disappointment.

Mel Gibson

Seriously...why?

Hacksaw Ridge, Gibson’s fifth attempt at directing, earned him an Oscar nomination not only for best picture but also best director.

So that basically means that the Academy chose not to condemn him but, instead, celebrate his career while also granting him a “comeback”. In case you forgot what made people hate him so much in the first place, let’s clear that up: he’s an anti-semite, incredibly racist across the board, and he also threatened to kill the mother of his children. Even after everything that happened at the 2017 Academy Awards, the fact that Mel Gibson was invited and even nominated is the most shocking. 

The Moonlight Mix-Up

This gaffe is going down in Academy Award history. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway presented the award that ended up being in the middle of a major mix-up. La La Land was announced the winner and only after the producers accepted their statues was Moonlight declared the actual winner. Turns out, Beatty and Dunaway were given the card for best actress (Emma Stone, La La Land), not best picture.

Beatty showed Dunaway the card and announced La La Land to be the winner, and the rest is history. Apparently, there are two briefcases each with a set of the 24 cards for each of the 24 awards which explains why Emma Stone claimed to still be holding the card for best actress.

The accounting firm PricewatrhouseCoopers handled the Oscars ballotting and admitted to being the ones to blame for the mix-up. As far as surprises go, it’s not a bad one.Moonlight deserves the recognition it’s getting, it’s just a shame they were denied their big moment.