Most people thought Pacino had it made. It was his sixth nomination, and if nothing else, the Academy would have offered it to him as a consolation prize for so many years of near misses. Fricker agreed. Unfortunately, this assumption had unpleasant consequences. During an appearance on the Tommy Tiernan Show In 2021, she recalled meeting Pacino backstage before the award was announced and how she became a little overconfident in her predictions.

“I came out of the toilet with the envelope and out of the corner of my eye I saw this older man on the railing,” she said. “It looked like he was in trouble. So I said, ‘Wait a minute,’ and I went over and said, ‘Are you OK?’ and his face went up and it was Al Pacino.”

Aside from the fact that Pacino was barely 50 years old at the time and therefore not an “older man,” he was apparently quite disturbed about having to go through another ceremony without knowing whether he would win. So Fricker tried to calm him down.

“I said, ‘But you’re going to win, this is the envelope, your name is in here, it’s no problem,'” she remembers. This seemed to calm Pacino, who picked himself up from the ground and left. In fact, Fricker hadn’t opened the envelope, and when she did (while standing on stage in front of the live audience), she read Joe Pesci’s name.

The actor didn’t reveal whether she spoke to Pacino after the ceremony, but it’s safe to say she wasn’t his favorite person that night. To his credit, he didn’t seem particularly shocked when Fricker mentioned Pesci’s name – he immediately started clapping, as all good sports do for their victorious rivals. Luckily for him, he only had to wait two years to get back to the Oscars, and he did so in style, securing a nomination for Best Supporting Actor Glengarry Glen Ross and finally he won the award for “Best Actor”. Scent of a woman.

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