Epic Fail?

   In case you hadn't heard, the big news over the weekend was that the wrong film was announced as winner in the Best Picture at the Oscars. The mistake was caught fairly quickly, but not before those representing the film that had been announced has come to the stage to accept their award. It was a bit of an awkward moment when the Oscars had to be given to the correct winners.
  I didn't think it was any big deal. Obviously I was mistaken. It was described as a "major flub" and an "epic mistake". I've been told that there are some who are saying the company charged with tabulating the votes and printing up the cards with the winning names on them should be fired. There was speculation on how it could have happened. One person commented that it was actually a blatant act of racism on the part of the Motion Picture Academy who clearly did not want an African American film to win Best Picture. There have been apologies, explanations and opinions from many people involved in producing the award show.
  I can't believe that people are making such a big deal out of this. I can't believe that someone called this an "epic fail". Epic? According an online dictionary epic can mean "heroic; majestic; impressively great" or "of unusually great size or extent". I really think that calling it epic is a bit extreme. An epic fail would be if no one had caught the mistake or even worse if the person who caught it chose to stay quiet to avoid embarrassing the presenters and/or the announced winners.
  This was quite simply a human mistake. It appears that there are two sets of cards and two people in charge of them. What happened is that the duplicate Best Actress card was given to the pair presenting the Best Picture award. It was a very simple mistake. Could it have been avoided? Sure it could have. The person with the duplicate Best Actress card could have thrown the copy away after the award was announced. The presenters, on finding the name of an actress instead of the name of a picture could have gone to the side of the stage to check the card they had. None of that was done.
  The funny thing is that this has happened before. In 1964 the wrong envelope was handed to Sammy Davis Jr. who read the name of the winner. The winner was not even nominated in the category for that award. The correct envelope was brought out and the correct winner was announced. It took a few minutes of searching the internet, but I found three other times when the wrong winner was announced at an award show. (Yes, one of them was last year's Miss Universe pageant.) 
  There hasn't been an article on the mistake for the last day or so. The fuss seems to have died down. I'm sure there will be a flurry action to make sure this doesn't happen again next year. I read an article on BBC.com that said it was unfortunate that this years Oscar award ceremony will be remembered because of the error at the end. No one will remember that the expected winner in the Best Picture category was upset by a low budget independent type film. No one will remember the diversity of the presenters. The writer felt that this was by far the more unfortunate thing.