89th Academy Awards

The 89th Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), honored the best films of 2016, and took place on February 26, 2017, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, at 5:30 p.m. PST. During the ceremony, AMPAS presented Academy Awards (commonly referred to as Oscars) in 24 categories. The ceremony, televised in the United States by ABC, was produced by Michael De Luca and Jennifer Todd and directed by Glenn Weiss. Comedian Jimmy Kimmel hosted the ceremony for the first time.

In related events, the Academy held its 8th Annual Governors Awards ceremony at the Grand Ballroom of the Hollywood and Highland Center on November 12, 2016. On February 11, 2017, in a ceremony at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, the Academy Scientific and Technical Awards were presented by hosts John Cho and Leslie Mann.

Moonlight won three awards including Best Picture and La La Land won the most awards of the ceremony with six after receiving a record-tying 14 nominations. In an event unprecedented in the history of the Oscars, La La Land was incorrectly announced as the Best Picture. After a few minutes, the error was corrected and Moonlight was declared the winner. Moonlight became the first film with an all-black cast and the first LGBT-themed film to win Best Picture. Hacksaw Ridge and Manchester by the Sea won two awards each. Winners with one award include Arrival, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Fences, The Jungle Book, O.J.: Made in America, Piper, The Salesman, Sing, Suicide Squad, The White Helmets, and Zootopia.

Winners and nominees
The nominees for the 89th Academy Awards were announced on January 24, 2017, via global live stream from the Academy. La La Land received the most nominations with a record-tying fourteen (1950's All About Eve and 1997's Titanic also achieved this distinction); Arrival and Moonlight came in second with eight apiece. La La Land's Best Picture loss to Moonlight meant it set a record for most nominations without winning Best Picture.

O.J.: Made in America, at 467 minutes, became the longest film to win an Academy Award, surpassing the 431-minute War and Peace, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1969. Following the win, Academy new rules barred any "multi-part or limited series" from being eligible for documentary categories. With Casey Affleck winning the Oscar for Best Actor, he and his older brother, Ben Affleck, became the 16th pair of siblings to win Academy Awards. Mahershala Ali became the first Muslim actor to win an Oscar. Viola Davis became the first black person to receive the Triple Crown of Acting with her Oscar, Tony and Emmy wins. 32-year-old Damien Chazelle became the youngest person to win Best Director; Norman Taurog was 33 when he won Best Director for the 1931 comedy Skippy.

Kevin O'Connell finally ended the longest losing streak in Oscar history after 20 unsuccessful nominations for sound mixing, winning for Hacksaw Ridge. Moonlight's Dede Gardner became the first woman to win twice for producing, following her previous Best Picture win for 12 Years a Slave. This was the first time since the 70th Academy Awards that none of the winners of the acting awards won for playing real people, and the first time since the 70th Academy Awards that all four acting winners were American.

Governors Awards
The Academy held its eighth annual Governors Awards ceremony on November 12, 2016, during which the following awards were presented:


 * Academy Honorary Awards


 * Jackie Chan Hong Kong martial artist, actor, director, producer, and singer.
 * Anne V. Coates British film editor.
 * Lynn Stalmaster American casting director.
 * Frederick Wiseman American filmmaker, documentarian, and theatrical director.

Presenters and performers
The following individuals presented awards or performed musical numbers.

Ceremony information


Due to the mixed reception and low ratings of the previous year's ceremony, producers David Hill and Reginald Hudlin declined to helm the Oscar production. They were replaced by Michael De Luca and Jennifer Todd as producers. Actor and comedian Chris Rock told Variety regarding if he would return to host, "Someone else will do it." On December 5, 2016, it was announced that Jimmy Kimmel would host the ceremony. Kimmel expressed that it was truly an honor and a thrill to be asked to host Academy Awards, commenting "Mike and Jennifer have an excellent plan and their enthusiasm is infectious. I am honored to have been chosen to host the 89th and final Oscars."

Due to his hosting duties, ABC did not broadcast a special episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! following the ceremony, as in past years. Instead, ABC aired Live from Hollywood: The After Party, co-hosted by Anthony Anderson, and Lara Spencer of Good Morning America. The stage set was designed by Derek McLane.

Box office performance of nominated films
At the time of the nominations announcement on January 24, 2017, the combined gross of the nine Best Picture nominees at the North American box offices was $483.8 million, with an average of $53.8 million per film. When the nominations were announced, Arrival was the highest-grossing film among the Best Picture nominees with $95.7 million in domestic box office receipts. La La Land was the second-highest-grossing film with $90.5 million, followed by Hidden Figures ($85 million), Hacksaw Ridge ($65.5 million), Fences ($48.8 million), Manchester by the Sea ($39 million), Hell or High Water ($27 million), Lion ($16.5 million) and Moonlight ($15.8 million).

Thirty-five nominations went to 13 films on the list of the top 50 grossing movies of the year. Of those 13 films, only Zootopia (3rd), Moana (15th), La La Land (45th), and Arrival (48th) were nominated for Best Picture, Best Animated Feature or any of the directing, acting or screenwriting awards. The other top 50 box-office hits that earned nominations were Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (4th), The Jungle Book (5th), Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (8th), Suicide Squad (10th), Doctor Strange (11th), Star Trek Beyond (24th), Trolls (25th), Passengers (30th), and Sully (32nd).

Racial diversity
In the previous two years, the awards had come under scrutiny for the lack of racial diversity among the nominees in major categories, which included no actors of color being nominated. After the nominees for the 89th Awards were announced on January 24, many media outlets noted the diversity of the nominations, which included a record-tying seven minority actors and a record-setting six black actors. For the first time in the Academy's history, each acting category had black actors, with three nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category and three black screenwriters nominated in the Best Adapted Screenplay category in the same year. Also nominated was one black director, the fourth in Oscar history.

The awards continued to be criticized by actors and media organizations representing non-black minorities. The National Hispanic Media Coalition stated that Latino actors were "not getting the opportunities to work in front of camera, and with few exceptions, in back of the camera as well." Daniel Mayeda, chair of the Asian Pacific American Media Coalition, stated that the omission of Asian actors from the nominations list (with only one actor, Dev Patel, nominated) reflected "the continued lack of real opportunities for Asians in Hollywood." A skit performed during the ceremony, in which a group of tourists enter the theater, led to criticism of host Jimmy Kimmel over his mocking of an Asian woman's name.

Having previously been nominated for Doubt (2008) and The Help (2011), Viola Davis became the first African-American actress to garner three Academy Award nominations. She went on to win the award, making her the first African-American to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting: winning a competitive Emmy, Tony, and Oscar in acting categories. Bradford Young became the first African-American to be nominated for Best Cinematography, while Joi McMillon became the first African-American to be nominated for Best Film Editing since Hugh A. Robertson for Midnight Cowboy, as well as the first black woman to be nominated for that award. Octavia Spencer became the first African-American actress to be nominated after having already won before.

Moonlight became the first film with an all-black cast to win the Best Picture award. Additionally, the ceremony had the most black winners of the Academy Awards ever.

Travel ban controversy
Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, who won the Best Foreign Language Film for The Salesman, was revealed to initially be unable to attend the ceremony due to President Donald Trump's immigration ban. He boycotted the event, saying, "I have decided to not attend the Academy Awards ceremony alongside my fellow members of the cinematic community." The Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs reacted to the travel ban, saying, "America should always be not a barrier but a beacon and each and every one of us knows that there are some empty chairs in this room which has made academy artists into activists."

Two prominent Iranian Americans – engineer Anousheh Ansari, known as the first female space tourist, and Firouz Naderi, a former director of Solar Systems Exploration at NASA – accepted Asghar Farhadi's Oscar on his behalf at the ceremony. Congratulations which had initially been tweeted to the Iranian people from the US State Department's official Persian-language Twitter account were deleted following the acceptance speech given by Firouz Naderi in which President Trump's travel ban was described as "inhumane".

Best Picture announcement error
Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway came onstage to present the award for Best Picture, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Bonnie and Clyde. After opening the envelope, Beatty hesitated to announce the winner, eventually showing it to Dunaway, who glanced at it and declared the favorites for the award, La La Land, the winner. However, more than two minutes later, as the producers of La La Land were making their acceptance speeches, Oscar crew members came on stage and took the envelopes from those assembled, explaining to them that there had been a mistake. La La Land producer Fred Berger, having heard the news, concluded his brief speech by saying "we lost, by the way".

Beatty was then given the correct opened envelope as La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz stepped to the microphone, announced the error, stated that Moonlight had actually won the award, and took the card bearing the film's title from Beatty's hand and showed it to the camera and the audience as proof. The La La Land team, particularly Horowitz, would later be praised for their professional handling of the situation. Beatty returned to the microphone and explained that the envelope he had initially been given named Emma Stone for her actress performance in La La Land, hence his confused pause, and confirmed that Moonlight was the winner. The producers of Moonlight then came onstage, Horowitz presented the Best Picture award given to him to them, and they gave their acceptance speeches.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) – the accounting firm responsible for tabulating results, preparing the envelopes, and handing them to presenters – creates two sets of envelopes, which are kept on opposite sides of the stage. It is intended that each award has one primary envelope and one backup envelope that remains with one of the PwC Accountants in the wings. Video stills from the broadcast show that Beatty and Dunaway had been given the single remaining still-unopened backup envelope for Actress in a Leading Role as they walked onto the stage.

PwC issued a statement apologizing for this error:

An article from The New York Times explained:

Brian Cullinan, the PwC accountant who handed Beatty the wrong envelope, had been instructed not to use social media during the event, but had tweeted a snapshot of Emma Stone moments after handing the wrong envelope to the official presenters.

Critical reception and television ratings
The show received a mixed reception from media publications. Some media outlets received the broadcast more positively with praise directed toward host Kimmel. Television critic Sonia Saraiya of the Variety remarked, "Kimmel's Oscars found a way to balance the telecast between that sensibility — the treacly self-satisfaction of sweeping orchestrals and tap-dancing starlets — and the very real widening gulf between the wealthy and cultured elites in Hollywood and the global public they make art for." Robert Bianco of USA Today said that, "a host can make matters better or worse, and on that scale, Kimmel definitely fell on the 'better' side. He was a constantly amusing, good-natured presence who usually hit the mark, and who was able to recover quickly when he didn't." Television critic Brian Lowry from CNN stated, "Kimmel proved a helpful choice given the polarized climate. He brought a light touch to his satire—acknowledging partisan division and poking at Trump without seeming mean-spirited—and an overall silliness to the proceedings."

Others were more critical of the show. Jeff Jensen of Entertainment Weekly remarked, "Kimmel (and/or the producers) didn't know when to stop and didn't know when to bail on stuff that wasn't working, a judgment fail that got more irritating at the show went long. They had to do the parachuting snack delivery thing three times?" Time television critic Daniel D'Addario wrote, "To dispense with what did not work: It was unfortunate that the evening's host didn't seem to share the evening's general embrace of humanity, but, well, one can't have everything." The Oregonian columnist Kristi Turnquist wrote, "His recurring visits got less entertaining as the evening dragged on." She added, "And does anybody else find the long-running mock feud between Kimmel and Matt Damon as hilarious as they do? By the end of the Oscars broadcast, this bit felt as tedious as the ill-advised recurring segments featuring actors waxing on about favorite films."

Attaining 33 million U.S. viewers according to Nielsen ratings, the ceremony's telecast had a 4-percent drop in viewership from last year's ceremony and had the lowest U.S. viewership since the 80th ceremony in 2008, which averaged 32 million viewers.

In July 2017, the ceremony presentation received eight nominations for the 69th Primetime Emmys. The following month, the ceremony won one of those nominations for Outstanding Directing for a Variety Special (Glenn Weiss).

In Memoriam
The annual In Memoriam segment was introduced by Jennifer Aniston with Sara Bareilles performing a rendition of the Joni Mitchell song "Both Sides, Now" during the montage. Beforehand, Aniston paid verbal tribute to actor Bill Paxton, who died the day before the ceremony. The segment paid tribute to:


 * Arthur Hiller
 * Ken Adam
 * Tracy Scott
 * Bill Nunn
 * Alice Arlen
 * George Kennedy
 * Gene Wilder
 * Donald P. Harris
 * Paul Sylbert
 * Michael Cimino
 * Andrzej Wajda
 * Patty Duke
 * Garry Marshall
 * Wilma Baker
 * Emmanuelle Riva
 * Janet Patterson
 * Anton Yelchin
 * Mary Tyler Moore
 * Prince
 * Kenny Baker
 * John Hurt
 * Jim Clark
 * Norma Moriceau
 * Fern Buchner
 * Kit West
 * Lupita Tovar
 * Manlio Rocchetti
 * Pat Conroy
 * Nancy Davis Reagan
 * Abbas Kiarostami
 * William Peter Blatty
 * Ken Howard
 * Tyrus Wong
 * Héctor Babenco
 * Curtis Hanson
 * Marni Nixon
 * Ray West
 * Raoul Coutard
 * Zsa Zsa Gabor
 * Antony Gibbs
 * Om Puri
 * Andrea Jaffe
 * Richard Portman
 * Debbie Reynolds
 * Carrie Fisher

Errors
The slide for Janet Patterson, an Australian costume designer, mistakenly used a photograph of Australian producer Jan Chapman, who is still alive.