The most chaotic Oscars ceremony in history: “It’s a serious business”
You’d think the Oscars would have a handle on drama by now. But in 2000, just weeks before the 72nd Academy Awards, the ceremony nearly unravelled…twice.
The chaos began with the theft of 55 Oscars statuettes from a loading dock just outside of Los Angeles. The 24-karat gold-plated trophies, destined for the hands of the year’s winners, were hijacked in transit. The statuette manufacturer, RS Owens, scrambled into full crisis mode. With less than a month to go, the factory worked around the clock to produce a fresh batch.
As it turns out, the scramble may have been unnecessary. According to RS Owens’ design director, Joseph Petree, the company always produced Oscars a year in advance. “What got stolen was next year’s statues,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. Still, the Academy couldn’t risk showing up empty-handed.
“They absolutely under no circumstances could run the risk of not having statues,” Petree explained. And just in case, a new set was made.
The plot thickened when a local junk scavenger named Willie Fulgear discovered 52 of the missing statuettes in a dumpster behind a Food 4 Less supermarket. He later joked that he had “more Oscars than any of the movie stars”. For his honesty and due diligence, Fulgear received a $50,000 reward from Roadway Express, the company known for hauling the statuettes, and also two tickets to the Oscars ceremony.
Even after recovering the trophies, the Academy chose not to use them. “They were never going to hand out a stolen statue,” Petree said. The remaining statues? One turned up in a Florida drug bust three years later. Meanwhile, the last two remain missing.
If the stolen Oscar trophies weren’t enough, another crisis unfolded: 4,000 voting ballots disappeared. A hefty portion of the total vote they mailed out the ballots from the Beverly Hills post office to be sent to the California Academy members. Five days after the initial handoff, not a single one arrived at its destination.
The Academy lit a fit under the postal service, where they devised a backup plan. If the ballots remained missing, they planned to swiftly send replacements out.
The Academy’s PR director at the time, John Pavlik, had dealt with it before. “This isn’t the first time,” he told Variety, referencing a similar blunder in 1982. The cause all boiled down to misfiling. Postal workers may have accidentally lumped the missing ballots in with bulk mail, which delayed their delivery.
Another slip-up turned logistical nightmare that makes the Golden Globes table mix-up look charming.
In the end, the 2000 Oscars went full speed ahead. They handed out new statuettes. The ballots were present and counted. Fulgear took his rightful seat. Notably, the ceremony remains one of the most spectacularly mismanaged moments in Academy history.
After the dust settled, RS Owens overhauled its process. The company stopped shipping the statuettes by land. The Academy switched shipping to air travel and even began sending each batch with armed security. “It’s a serious business,” said Petree. “I always gave the Academy kudos: if you want something to be important, you have to make it important.”
