When Cher took the stage late in the Grammy Awards ceremony on Sunday night, the show had largely proceeded without a hitch. Alex Warren had a few technical difficulties during his performance of “Ordinary,” and the TV censors missed an expletive during a speech by Lola Young. Still, the night had felt largely effortless.
“I don’t do this part very well,” Cher, 79, began, seemingly referring to speaking, not singing, in front of an audience. “I mean, put a microphone in my hand and have some music — I’m great.”
She appeared to foretell what was to come. When she left the stage prematurely, only to return to seemingly bestow the award for record of the year on a singer who had died more than two decades ago, she joined a group of celebrity presenters whose distinguished résumés now include an award-show gaffe.
Cher, who had not been on a Grammys stage in 18 years, was actually there on Sunday for two purposes: to present record of the year and to accept a lifetime achievement award.
“I guess I’m supposed to walk off now,” she said after receiving her award. Except that she wasn’t.
Trevor Noah, the ceremony’s host, hurried to keep Cher around. “Before you go, could we get you to announce the nominees?”
Cher dutifully made her way back to the microphone, where she eventually opened the record of the year envelope before pausing awkwardly. “They told me it was going to be on the prompter,” she said, waving a hand in the air.
Finally, the winner came: “Oh, the Grammy goes to Luther Gandross!” Cher said, flubbing the name of Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s lovelorn duet “Luther,” as well as, it appeared, that of the great R&B singer who inspired it: Luther Vandross, who died in 2005.
She quickly realized her mistake and announced the actual winners.
Later, in an interview with “Entertainment Tonight,” SZA offered Cher a touch of grace. “She’s not wrong,” SZA said, adding: “She probably really knew Luther Vandross. Of course her brain and her energy is connecting that energy to the energy that we’re sharing.”
Either way, the moment felt destined to join a running list of awards ceremony mishaps.
John Travolta famously butchered the pronunciation of Idina Menzel’s name at the 2014 Academy Awards, calling the Tony Award winner and “Frozen” star “Adele Dazeem.” (In a later apology, he said that after he’d beaten himself up over the blunder, he had decided to do what Menzel would: “Let it go, let it go.”)
The next year at the Oscars, Menzel jokingly introduced Travolta as “Glom Gazingo.”
There have been other noteworthy moments of confusion. At the 2015 Miss Universe contest, the host Steve Harvey announced Miss Colombia, Ariadna Gutiérrez Arévalo, as the winner, accidentally robbing Miss Philippines, Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach, of her crown. “This was a terribly honest human mistake and I am so regretful,” Harvey said on social media. (The mistake was quickly corrected.)
At the Oscars in 2024, Al Pacino seemed to confuse some 20 million Americans when he skipped announcing the 10 best picture nominees and went straight for the envelope.
“And my eyes see ‘Oppenheimer,’” he said as the audience responded with murmurs and then applause. Was he only prognosticating, or did Christopher Nolan and company win the film industry’s top prize? Surely, the customary “And the Oscar goes to …” would have helped.
In a statement after the ceremony, Pacino said of having skipped reciting the names of the best picture nominees: “I just want to be clear it was not my intention to omit them, rather a choice by the producers not to have them said again since they were highlighted individually throughout the ceremony.”
Surely the biggest awards-show flub in recent memory came at the 2017 Oscars, when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced the wrong best picture winner. As the cast and crew of “La La Land” began to relish their victory, the mistake was realized.
Jordan Horowitz, a “La La Land” producer, shot to the microphone. “You guys, I’m sorry, no,” he said. “There’s a mistake. ‘Moonlight,’ you guys won best picture.” The audience gasped.
The moment led PwC, the accounting firm that tabulates Oscar votes for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, to adopt new rules. An investigation revealed that one of the two PwC representatives attending the Oscars had mistakenly handed Beatty not the envelope for best picture but a backup one for best actress, which moments earlier had gone to Emma Stone for, yes, “La La Land.”
Still, while such mistakes can cause confusion, regret and even a stinging, if unwarranted, sense of defeat, they can also, ironically, prompt delight.
Speaking with “Entertainment Tonight” after the Grammys on Sunday night, Leon Thomas, the R&B singer who won two awards, called Cher’s flub “actually probably one of my favorite moments of the night.”
Derrick Bryson Taylor is a Times reporter covering breaking news in culture and the arts.
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