Incredibly Rare Oscars Tie Stuns Multiple Winners

For just the seventh time in history, there was a tie at the Academy Awards.

In a stunning turn of events, the Best Live-Action Short category resulted in a tie. Comedian and Oscar nominee Kumail Nanjiani presented the award to both The Singers and Two People Exchanging Saliva.

Sunday night’s tie is the first in over a decade. The last time an Oscar went to co-winners was in 2013, when Zero Dark Thirty and Skyfall both won for Best Sound Editing. It is the second such occurrence for the Live-Action Short category.

“Everyone, calm down. We’re gonna get through this. Calm down! Remain calm!” Nanjiani joked.

He announced The Singers as the first winner, allowing their team to give a speech before announcing the next winner, Two People Exchanging Saliva.

“I didn’t know that was a thing, the tie,” The Singers’ director Sam Davis said in his acceptance speech.

The two speeches ran so long that the microphone began retracting midway through the second.

Since the Academy Awards began in 1929, a tie has occurred only six other times.

The first was in 1932, when the Best Actor award was given to both Fredrich March for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Wallace Beery for The Champ. March actually earned one more vote than Beery, but according to the Academy’s rules at the time, any nominee within three votes of the winner would also receive the award. The rules have since changed to account for exact vote tallies.

In 1949, A Chance to Live and So Much for So Little shared the Documentary Short award. Nearly two decades later, Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand shared the Best Actress award for The Lion in Winter and Funny Girl, respectively.

At the 59th ceremony in 1986, the Best Documentary Feature was handed to both Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got and Down and Out in America.

Sunday’s win is the second tie in the Live-Action Short category, the first going to Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Trevor in 1994.