Take it! Take it!

Netnet Camomot

ACCOUNTING is “the art of recording, classifying, and summarizing in a significant manner and in terms of money, transactions and events which are, in part at least of financial character, and interpreting the results thereof.”

That’s according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

Thus, when the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) apologized for its managing partner Brian Cullinan’s huge boo-boo at the Oscars, the first thought that came to my mind was, Well, there goes the art.

Art is not an exact science, and that can be your defense against an auditor as he slaps a finding against your financial records: Hey! Accounting is not an exact science!

Still, accountants are known for their meticulousness in looking for a five-cent variance, and a colleague offering to pay for that five cents won’t be able to reconcile anything. The cause of the variance has to be found in the accounting records or else, uh, sleepless nights for the accountant.

Cullinan must be having sleepless nights, too. He was tweeting a photo of best actress winner Emma Stone minutes before he erroneously gave the best-actress envelope to best-picture presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.

Tweeting during the Oscars show is a big no-no for the PwC accountants who are ordered by their bosses to focus only on one thing: giving the appropriate winning Oscars envelopes to the presenters. They’re also told to memorize the names of the winners, so they could immediately react in case the wrong name is declared as the winner. But Cullinan was probably checking out the reactions to his tweet when he gave the wrong envelope to Beatty and Dunaway?

We are aware that texting or a phone call while driving is dangerous to one’s life. And it’s now proven that using your phone while handing out the winning Oscars envelopes to presenters is dangerous to one’s credibility.

Cullinan’s job at the Oscars could be the easiest assignment for an accountant whose usual work is complicated: preparing financial statements, giving updates on complicated tax laws, trying to understand the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Or the Internal Revenue Service in the US.

But it could be the simplicity of the assignment that made him complacent. Add to that the many distractions backstage, with Hollywood celebrities walking around in their most glamorous looks—only an extremely focused accountant could stop himself from taking photos and sharing them through social media.

The 83-year relationship between the Oscars and PwC never had this kind of challenge. It sailed ever so smoothly each year as PwC counted votes for each category, and stuffed the winners’ names into envelopes which they guarded with their heart and soul. But the Oscars’ producers must be thinking of this now: if PwC could make a mistake in this simple task of giving an envelope to a presenter, imagine all the other boo-boos it’s capable of committing. This proves that a simple thing rarely exists—everything has the potential to be complicated. Yup, like a Facebook relationship status: It’s complicated.

Accounting is important to a business. It’s not in-charge of marketing and selling, but these two departments gauge their progress through the figures provided by accountants. It’s like monitoring your weight. Accounting is kind of your weighing scale.

This may not be fair to people seriously afflicted with the obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), but can’t help describe accountants as having OCD—their rabid drive to look for that five-cent variance is one good proof of this. Thus, for Cullinan to give the wrong envelope to the presenters might boggle another accountant’s mind: How could he?! His OCD was off that night?

But an accountant is a human being after all. S**t happens.

A friend reminded me about the “Take it! Take it!” issue in the 1994 Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF), when the presenters declared Gabby Concepcion and Ruffa Gutierrez as best actor and best actress respectively, instead of Edu Manzano and Aiko Melendez. Lolit Solis, who was the manager of Concepcion, later confessed to orchestrating the whole thing. She said she “just wanted to make him happy.”

Gretchen Barretto, Miss Mauritius Viveka Babajee, and Rocky Gutierrez were then the presenters for best actress. Barretto was about to read the name of the real winner when Babajee suddenly said, “Ruffa Gutierrez!” Right after, Babajee whispered to Ruffa’s younger bro Rocky to “Take it, take it,” referring to the paper that had Melendez’s name.

Babajee represented her country in the Miss Universe 1994 contest which was held here in Pinas. She then became a house guest of the Gutierrezes, and somehow ended up as presenter at the MMFF.

The accountants assigned to hand out envelopes at the Oscars next year will definitely be as focused as the bug that’s building a mud nest on my window pane. Lesson learned. One envelope at a time, one scoop of mud at a time, one day at a time.