Some wacky old things happened last night at The Oscars, didn’t they? People thought they’d won awards they hadn’t, a lady fell asleep, someone’s chair broke – what a crazy, nightmarish descent into madness it was for everybody.
Yet aside from the blunder that’s grabbing all the headlines this morning, another, perhaps even more embarrassing mistake went largely unnoticed. It shouldn’t have, of course, because it’s so heinously offensive to everyone involved. Like, dancing on a grave and live-streaming it to the world, offensive.
During the montage of all the Hollywood royalty that we unfortunately lost last year, the following image appeared:
Now, an Academy Award nominated costume designer by the name of Janet Patterson did sadly die last year, so should most definitely been included in the montage, but there’s a problem – that is not a picture of Janet Patterson. That’s a picture of Jan Chapman, an Australian producer known for films like The Piano. She is alive.
To make matters worse, she was mates with Janet Patterson. Pretty unforgivable, right? Chapman had this to say to Variety:
“I was devastated by the use of my image in place of my great friend and long-time collaborator Janet Patterson. I had urged her agency to check any photograph which might be used and understand that they were told that the Academy had it covered. Janet was a great beauty and four-time Oscar nominee and it is very disappointing that the error was not picked up.”
How did it happen? Well, if you Google Janet Patterson, a number of pictures of Jan Chapman appear (presumably because they were friends and worked on some of the same movies), but surely whoever put the montage together didn’t just use the first image they found on image search?
Nope, just the third one.
