Controversy at the Academy Awards

Did the organisers of the 89th Academy Awards blunder when they handed Warren Beatty the envelope for best actress instead of best picture, or was the fix in and someone gave Beatty the wrong envelope as a kind of heads up, the winner wasn't really the winner.

This kind of error rarely happens, especially at the level of the Oscars, so you have to at least ask the question. People get caught cheating in sports all the time, so why not awards like these.

One way to settle things would be to open up the voting records to independent third party scrutiny, and then sample those voters to ensure their vote was properly recorded - a two step vote verification system. Call it an audit if you like, an audit of PwC who counted the votes in the first instance.

Until that is done, I lifted the following from Twitter...

The Big Short

I went to see the movie, The Big Short, today and I liked it. It's been nominated for an Academy Award for best picture and you know what? It might just win it.

The best performance is by Steve Carell playing a punctilious fund manager called Mark Baum, a character based on the real Steve Eisman. What I really like about this guy is he doesn't trust anything or anyone. He interviews people about the impending collapse and sends his staff to check out houses to find them empty and in arrears. It's all good fun, though I'm left scratching my head a little with the film's message; that strippers shouldn't be allowed to own five houses. I dunno, their money is as good as anyone's I would have thought, but hey, with 5% down, that's maybe not so good.

I'm rambling. Anyway there are other characters, such as Michael Burry of Silicon Investor (SI) message board fame. He's a contrarian, who I think fancies himself as a value investor. I've seen him post on SI recommending John Deere, so I suppose he is, but he most certainly is contrarian. The thinking of a contrarian goes that, if everyone thinks something is a good idea, then it almost certainly isn't and you should be doing the opposite.

Then these two young guns who operate a boutique 'garage band' fund team up with an old-timer played by Brad Pitt. The young guns invest in options on anything that predicts bad things will happen. Mostly these options are cheap and so when bad does happen, they clean up. Risky I'd say. But heh. They're backed into the big leagues by Brad Pitt's character, a New Age capitalist cum philosopher.

Last but by no means least is the person who narrates the movie. This guy is an operator out to make the bucks, driven by the main chance.

What's interesting is that the only people who meet and do business together are the young guns with Brad Pitt, and in another group the Steve Carell camp working with the main chancer. Other than that they all operate alone and often against the grain.

Of course the lovely Marisa Tomei pops in which is always pleasing. She's hot. For the younger members of the audience the cute Selena Gomez turns up to explain what a synthetic CDO is.

I fully recommend The Big Short.