For most of us at home, the Best Picture mix-up at last year’s Oscars was a delightful moment of live TV madness, the sort of thing that rarely happens in today’s post-”wardrobe malfunction” world, but at least one guy in the entertainment industry seems to have enjoyed it just as much as those of us at home did. As noted in The Hollywood Reporter’s extensive oral history of the mishap, during which presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway mistakenly announced La La Land as the Best Picture instead of Moonlight, Steve Harvey was actually ecstatic when he realized someone had finally done something worse than his own Miss Universe fuck-up from 2015.
Harvey was hosting that year’s Miss Universe show, and at the end of the event he mistakenly read the wrong contestant’s name as the winner. It was really funny, because Steve Harvey seems like a bit of a jerk, but apparently the mistake weighed so heavily on his soul that he felt compelled to celebrate when Beatty and Dunaway did the same thing at the Oscars. He says he recognized the “panic-stricken look on the producer’s face” before the mistake was explained, so he knew exactly what was going on. “When he walked out there and snatched that card out of Warren’s hand,” Harvey told THR, “that’s when I knew redemption was mine. I was finally off the hook.”
Harvey says he “lit a cigar and drank a glass of scotch and celebrated” after the Oscars, even though we all definitely still remember when he said the wrong winner at Miss Universe and we all still think it’s pretty funny.