If you were watching the Oscars live and did a double take when they announced two winners for Best Live Action Short Film, don’t worry, you weren’t hallucinating. It actually happened.
Today, Netflix’s The Singers, directed by Sam A Davis and Jack Piatt, shared the win with the French short filmTwo People Exchanging Saliva by Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata.
For context, this is seriously uncommon. The Academy’s voting system has racked up just six other official ties across nearly a century of gold statues, sparkly gowns and Jennifer Lawrence falling up stairs.
It first happened at the 5th Oscars in 1932, when Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and Wallace Beery (The Champ) both scored the Best Actor prize. Technically, March had one more vote, but the rules back then said anything within three votes counted as a tie. That’s since been scrapped, so these days it has to be a dead-set draw to double up.
From there, history served a few more joint wins: A Chance to Live and So Much For So Little split the Documentary Short award in 1949, Katharine Hepburn (The Lion in Winter) and Barbra Streisand (Funny Girl) famously shared Best Actress in 1969, Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got and Down and Out in America tied for Documentary Feature in 1986, Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Trevor split Live Action Short in 1994, and Skyfall and Zero Dark Thirty both scored the Sound Editing gong in 2012.
So yeah, Davis and Singh are now card-carrying members of one of the most exclusive clubs in Hollywood.
Their double win feels especially poetic given how wildly different the films are. The Singers is a muted little gem about a working-class bar hiding a secret love for song, while Two People Exchanging Saliva is a surreal French fever dream where people pay for things by slapping each other — capitalism, but make it queer and kinky.
While the tied winners were up on stage, Singh used his acceptance speech to call out Timothée Chalamet’s past shade toward opera and ballet, reminding the crowd that “we can change society through art, through creativity, through theatre and ballet, and oh, oh oh, also cinema”.
For the short film category, they fit a lot of drama in!
If you want to catch up on all the tea you may have missed from the Oscars, you can head to our live blog HERE.
