Who you gonna call? Steve Harvey and the Miss Universe Twitter accounts teased Warren Beatty for his Best Picture mix-up at the 2017 Oscars on Sunday, February 26, alluding to their own fiasco from 2015. Watch the clip above to relive the awkward Oscar moment!
“Have your people call our people — we know what to do. #Oscars #MissUniverse,” the official Miss Universe account tweeted shortly after the shocking moment on Sunday.
“Call me Warren Beatty,” Harvey, 60, tweeted the following morning. “I can help you get through this! #Oscars.”
On Sunday, Beatty, 79, caused Twitter — and the audience at the Dolby Theatre — to melt down after he erroneously announced La La Land as the winner of Best Picture. In fact, it was underdog drama Moonlight that took home the top honor.
Similarly, in December 2015, Harvey accidentally crowned Miss Colombia Ariadna Gutiérrez as the winner of the beauty pageant before realizing his mistake and giving the tiara and flowers to the actual winner, Miss Philippines Pia Wurtzbach. The talk show host later explained that he had mixed up the names of the winner and the first runner-up when he revealed the winner, leading to the torturously awkward task of dethroning Miss Colombia.
“It was the most gut-wrenching walk I’ve ever had in my life,” Harvey told Jimmy Fallon during an interview one year later, of having to go back out on stage to admit his embarrassing mistake. “I was brought up that way, man, to kind of just face whatever there is, so I went out and dealt with it.”
Though a clear explanation of what happened at Sunday night’s Oscars has yet to surface, auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, which handles the Oscar balloting, issued an apology after the monumental mix-up, pointing out that it wasn’t Beatty (or Faye Dunaway, his copresenter) who were at fault.
“We sincerely apologize to Moonlight, La La Land, Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, and Oscar viewers for the error that was made during the award announcement for Best Picture,” the company said in a statement. “The presenters had mistakenly been given the wrong category envelope and when discovered, was immediately corrected. We are currently investigating how this could have happened, and deeply regret that this occurred.”
