It goes without saying that organizing an award show is never easy. There are a lot of things that can go wrong - a lot of variables involved that cannot all be controlled. Despite the preparations made, a slip-up can occur, especially when the award show happens to be the Oscars. On the screen, everything looks pretty and immaculate, but behind the stage, it is something akin to a cinematic purge.

The 2000 Oscar Ceremony, however, has to be the most significant of them all, where everything just went haywire.   

The whole ordeal began when 55 Oscars statuettes were stolen from the loading dock in LA before the 72nd Academy Awards. The problem was that these statuettes took time to be made, and the show was just a few weeks away. Still, the factory that made them worked day and night to replace them on time, so that the winners would not have to go empty-handed from the ceremony.

It seems like a happy ending and not a topic to discuss, right? Well, what happened next was the real smack on the head. It turns out that the stolen awards were for the 73rd Academy Awards and not the 72nd. The Academy always has them made one year in advance, so the whole ruckus was for nothing.

Anyhow, this was not just the only nightmare in the story. The one crucial thing that helps decide a winner - the ballots - went missing. Around 4,000 voting ballots disappeared due to an error on the part of postal workers, adding to the chaos. 

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Anyhow, the story does not end here either. There is more to the whereabouts of the stolen awards.

In a dramatic turn of events, 52 of the stolen awards were discovered by a local junk scavenger named Willie Fulgear. They were sitting in a dumpster in Koreatown in LA. He turned in the stolen awards to the LAPD and was subsequently rewarded $50,000 by the company responsible for the transport of the statuettes. 

While the awards were retrieved and the culprits caught, the Academy did not proceed with the same statuettes. Later, one of the remaining awards was discovered in Florida; however, the other two were never found.

The year 2000 has hence been marked as one of the messiest Oscar ceremonies in the history of the award show. While mishaps are scattered across its trajectory, from misses based on partiality over complexions to gender politics, the Academy has maintained an odd prestige over the industry.

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Do you think the 2026 Oscars can be the smoothest one ever? Let us know in the comments.