The evening's last-minute shocker wasn't just "Moonlight's" upset Best Picture Oscar win over "La La Land," but the way it went down, with presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announcing the wrong movie. Not their fault, apparently, but still ... Steve Harvey must be feeling pretty smug right now. (Actually, he's not.)
It was really a shame, since the 89th Academy Awards show was otherwise pretty hard to find fault with. Jimmy Kimmel was a funny host, the speeches were mostly free of shrill political rhetoric, the "In Memoriam" montage snubbed only one major figure (sorry, Garry Shandling), and even the Art Deco stage set was gorgeous. And yet, the final gaffe is going to be all that anyone can talk about for a while. Which is unfortunate, since there were a lot of moments from Sunday's Oscars, good or bad, that were memorable.
Fittingly, the tourists seemed not at all star-struck or even all that impressed, though there was a nice moment when engaged Chicago couple Gary and Vicki got Vicki's favorite actor, Denzel Washington, to pretend to officiate over their wedding. Despite being made Kimmel's unwilling victims in front of an audience of hundreds of millions, the tourists came through with aplomb. Rather, it was the celebrities who appeared embarrassed -- at being treated like commodities or zoo animals and, in Jennifer Aniston's case, being cajoled by Kimmel to fork over a pair of sunglasses from her pocketbook as a wedding gift.
