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We’ve all seen it by now, and if you haven’t, do yourself a favor and put yourself into an embarrassment coma by watching Miss Universe pageant host Steve Harvey read the wrong name as the winner, then sheepishly re-take the stage and correct his error.

Oh, Miss Colombia. That one’s gonna sting for a while. Unless your name is “Miss Philippines,” there aren’t a whole lot of silver linings to go around today. Actually, that’s not entirely true. The Miss Universe pageant has probably never gotten this much attention, certainly not in the United States. And while, yes, that attention is being paid to a catastrophe, there’s an angle from which to look at this that makes Miss Universe look good. If anything, it makes Miss Universe look honest.

Who would have ever known that Steve Harvey read the wrong name? If the Miss Universe folks had wanted to cover up embarrassment, they could have just rolled with it. Miss Colombia is your new Miss Universe! Okay! The pageant folks could clam up to avoid egg on their faces. Steve Harvey barely wanted to admit what he did in the moment. He sure as hell wasn’t going to tell anybody. But the pageant came clean, and Harvey trudged back onto that stage, and the truth came out. Because, as it turns out, that’s what happens when televised award presentations screw up.

You know who else this is great news for? Marisa Tomei. Tomei won the 1992 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for My Cousin Vinny. It remains one of the more surprising Oscar wins of the past 25 years.

For one thing, Vinny was far from an Oscar-type movie. Tomei beat out critical faves like Judy Davis (for Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives) and Vanessa Redgrave (in the many-times-nominated costume drama Howards End). She was not expected to win. And yet when presenter Jack Palance opened the evelope, it was Tomei’s name that he read. In the years since, a nagging, fantastical, winking rumor has persisted that Palance read the wrong name that night. He was old, he was drunk, he was reading the names on the Prompter instead of the name in the card. Earlier this year, Gawker’s Rich Juzwiak wrote a comprehensive history of the moment and of the rumors that have persisted. He also laid out a rather definitive debunking, mostly by pointing to the video of the ceremony where you can clearly see Palance reading from the card.

Still, Tomei’s win was such a shock that for years people seemed ready to believe a conspiracy theory — not only that Palance read the wrong name but that the Academy never corrected the error as a method of self-preservation. Juzwiak’s article also referred back to an old Roger Ebert column where he’d addressed the Palance/Tomei urban legend, in which he stressed that the Price-Waterhouse accountants who are on hand at every Oscar ceremony are poised to intervene in the case of such a blunder, “and they are not shy.” Of course, we’ve never seen that happen at the Oscars, so who’s to say whether that actually happens or if it’s just lip service? Last night, at the Miss Universe pageant, we saw what happens when the wrong winner’s name gets announced on live TV. It’s awkward, and it’s embarrassing, but the record gets corrected.

If I were Marisa Tomei today, I’d be sending out links to Steve Harvey’s blunder (and correction) on YouTube to everybody in Hollywood with a note reading “THAT’S what it looks like when the wrong winner’s name gets read.”