The 2017 Academy Awards ceremony will live in infamy as the year that Warren Beatty announced the wrong freaking Best Picture winner (our mouths remain agape), but the metro Phoenix theater community will remember it as the time a local director was thanked from the winner's podium. Emma Stone won Best Actress for her role in La La Land, and among the list of people she mentioned in her speech was Bobb Cooper, producing artistic director of Valley Youth Theatre. Stone, a Scottsdale native, performed in a number of VYT productions as a child before moving to Los Angeles at the age of 15 to pursue big-time acting dreams. We must admit, we felt a thrill of local pride not only to see the first Arizona-born actor take home an Oscar, but to hear her give love to one of our own.