CapnAndy posted:

I feel like what happens is Beatty opens the envelope, sees the card, and immediately knows he's got the wrong card, and has no idea what to do now, so he sorta freezes up. Everything he does, the looking offstage, then to the card, then out into the crowd, then the card at a new angle, he's trying to find the person who's gonna tell him what the gently caress to do. The problem is that he's showing nobody else the card and saying nothing, so to everyone else -- including Dunaway -- it looks like he's doing a "ha ha I'm not telling anyone the winner" shtick. And so when she rips the card away from him, it's because she's out of patience with his little gag, so she just looks for a movie name and reads it out loud.

Which just goes to show just how much had to go wrong for the whole thing to happen; if they open the card together or Beatty isn't too shocked to say literally anything at all ("this isn't right", "I think I have the wrong card here", "why does this say Emma Stone", anything), they still could have averted disaster at the last moment. It really took a perfect storm to get the wrong winner named on air.