It may be too little too late.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is considering legal action over the list that launched a media frenzy and made the organization fearful of a security breach.
"If, in fact, something comes along that shows laws were broken, we will take action against whoever broke them," Academy spokesman John Pavlik said Thursday. "This is a serious kind of thing for us. We don't like the suggestion that our secrecy can be violated."
On Monday, Knowles presented a list of eight nominees in each category, saying it was the preliminary list from which the finalists would be chosen. "You always wonder who didn't quite make the cut, who was 6th, 7th and 8th," he wrote.
He also claimed the list, attributed to "Doctor Evil's Evil Lite Son," came from "deep within the halls of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences." (At the time, an Academy spokesperson told E! Online the list was "a hoax, totally untrue. All will be revealed on Tuesday.")
Knowles' purported Oscar list nailed all 20 acting nominees, but missed the Best Picture nod for The Cider House Rules and omitted two Best Director contenders (Cider House's Lasse Hallstrom and Being John Malkovich's Spike Jonze).
Now, after discovering the list was false and from a galaxy far from the "halls of the Academy," the Internet movie-gossip columnist is backpedaling like crazy.
Today on the site, Knowles says the list was actually swiped from the computer of a freelance writer for ABC.com who was preparing to load a story immediately after the real nominations were announced. Knowles adds that he wound up looking "like a complete moron."
"The list printed by Knowles, which he claimed was an offical voting list, was in fact part of a list of guesses made by the ABC.com staff in preparation for going online with the actual nominations at 5:38 a.m. Tuesday morning," the Academy's Ric Robertson told Daily Variety.
Knowles says his source was "just some guy out there that thought he found something really cool, got excited, overstated his material and sent it to me."
"There was never an attempt on an Academy computer. The nominations were never in any danger. And both PricewaterhouseCoopers (the accounting firm that counts the votes) and the Academy can sleep well at night knowing that at no point was there any failure in their security."
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