One of the biggest surprises of Oscars night came early on — and in the Best Live Action Shot film category — where the Academy Awards had its seventh tie in history.
Kumail Nanjiani took the stage Sunday night to announce the winner in the Live Action Short Film category, where he soon learned that the vote actually ended in a tie between “The Singers” and “Two People Exchanging Saliva.”
“It’s a tie. I’m not joking, it’s actually a tie,” Nanjiani said. “So everyone calm down. We’re gonna get through this. I’m gonna name one winner, they’ll come up and accept their award, and then I’ll come back and name another winner, and then they’ll accept their award. OK, here we go.”
Ending in a tie at the Academy Awards is an extreme rarity, one that had only happened six other times in the previous 97 ceremonies at the show. This marks the first Oscars tie since 2013, when “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Skyfall” were both recognized in the Best Sound Editing.
“Ironic that the short film Oscar is gonna take twice as long,” Nanjiani joked in between the presentation. The presenter had previously noted that features should turn into short films to save viewing time — an ironic request given the double-length nature of the win.
One of the filmmakers behind “The Singers” remarked that they didn’t know a tie was even possible at the Academy Awards, while the team behind “Two People Exchanging Saliva” noted that a tie had happened three other times in Oscars’ history.
In reality, there have been six ties at the Oscars before, though, in the Academy’s early days, they accepted anything within two votes to be a “tie.” They later changed the rules so that an exact tie was needed.
Previous ties include Best Actor in 1932 (Fredric March in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and Wallace Beery in “The Champ”), Best Documentary (Short Subject) in 1950 (“A Chance to Live” and “So Much So Little”), Best Documentary Feature in 1987 (“Artie Shaw: Time is All You’ve Got” and “Down and Out in America”) and Best Short Film (Live Action) in 1995 (“Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Trevor”).
The most famous came in 1969, when Best Actress ended in a tie between Katharine Hepburn in “A Lion in Winter” and Barbra Streisand in “Funny Girl.” At the time, however, Academy president Gregory Peck admitted that an exception had been made to add Streisand to the Academy in 1967, despite the fact that she had yet to be in a movie prior to that year. Assuming she voted for herself, this early admittance policy ended up getting Streisand the tie — and costing Hepburn the outright win.
“I just want to give a congratulations to the two winners,” host Conan O’Brien said after they left the stage. “You just ruined 22 million Oscar pools.”
