A Mix-Up At The 2023 BAFTAs Turned Into Another Awkward Awards Show Moment

And the award really goes to... Six years after the jaw-dropping 2017 Oscars Best Picture mix-up, the 2023 BAFTAs included the latest awkward awards show snafu. While CODA’s Troy Kotsur was presenting the Best Supporting Actress award at London’s Royal Festival Hall on Feb. 19, the in-house sign language voiceover interpreter mistakenly announced She Said’s Carey Mulligan as the winner. Realizing the error, he quickly corrected himself, inviting Kerry Condon to accept the BAFTA for her performance in The Banshees of Inisherin, instead.

Unlike with the Oscars, BBC One aired the British awards on a time delay, so the error was edited out of the final broadcast. “Carey was a really good sport and laughing about the mix-up. She looked visibly shocked when her name was announced,” an unnamed audience member told MailOnline. Noting audible gasps in the hall, the website reported that the interpreter said, “This is a bad moment.” Later, host Richard E. Grant also reportedly joked that “a defibrillator [was] needed for Carey Mulligan” following the slip-up.

During a backstage press conference, Condon described her “surreal” win without calling out the blunder specifically. “The whole thing was just like this black-out weird moment,” the actor told reporters, according to Variety. “All I remember is looking and seeing all the boys [from the film] looking at me, like ‘Get up!’ It was really surreal.”

When something similar happened stateside at the 2017 Academy Awards, the correction didn’t come so quickly. After Bonnie and Clyde co-stars Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty — to whom a PricewaterhouseCooper (PwC) accountant responsible for tallying the votes handed the wrong envelope — incorrectly announced La La Land as the year’s Best Picture winner, the film’s producers were already giving their acceptance speech when they were informed of the mistake. The real winner was Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, but few could make sense of the chaos in the moment.

“I’ve never been as distraught as I was at the Vanity Fair party after the Oscars,” Jenkins told The Hollywood Reporter in February 2018. “I mean, did you see the show? It’s not the kind of thing where you go running off with pompoms. Something had changed. I wasn’t sure what that thing was. I wasn’t sure that thing was mine or who it belonged to because of how everything happened. And it made 2017 a very long year.”

In order to avoid a repeat of the envelope snafu, PwC adopted new Oscars rules the following year. Among the changes were that accountants would begin confirming with each celebrity presenter that they’re holding the correct envelope. Meanwhile, another PwC employee also now sits inside the show’s control room, with the full list of winners. As the BAFTAs clearly proved, however, mistakes still happen.