You could call it winning ugly. And winning ugly isn’t always fair.

But we’re addicted to it anyway.

Let’s acknowledge two things. First, the way “Moonlight’’ won the Oscar for best picture at the Academy Awards Sunday night was a profound disservice to a quietly radical and most deserving movie, as well as a mortification to everyone else.

Barry Jenkins’s wise, compassionate film about the three stages of a boy’s life — of how many layers of camouflage and self-deception there can be when that boy is black, poor, and gay — is worthy of a moviegoer’s attention beyond the fact that it “beat out’’ “La La Land,’’ or that it wasn’t expected to win, or that a snafu resulted in the wrong envelope being brought onstage and then misread.

That the cast and filmmakers of “La La Land’’ were already on the podium giving their acceptance speeches when the error became clear made it even more of a historic Academy face-plant. It meant that talented creative artists had to pull an emotional U-turn and cede the stage to the real winners, which the “La La Land’’ crew did with the graciousness of good and decent people. (What, they were going to wrestle for the statue right there in front of a worldwide audience?)

The gaffe also put director Jenkins and everyone involved with “Moonlight’’ in the position of seeming to have to apologize for winning best picture, when they presumably just felt bad about interrupting someone else’s mistaken moment of triumph. Is there more of a no-win situation than having to say, “Actually, um, excuse me, we won’’?

It should and could have been an unalloyed celebration of a film, made for a measly $1.5 million, that now will be able to take its story to the widest possible audience — a movie made with care and heart and craft about the kind of people our media (and our politicians) assure us we think we already know but most assuredly do not.

Instead, the evening turned into a mosh pit of confusion, good intentions, and polite chagrin. “Moonlight’’ deserved better. So did the makers of “La La Land,’’ even if Damien Chazelle’s movie musical went home with six awards — the most of the night.

But here’s the second thing we all have to own up to. We love it when our institutions go off-script. We may cringe with embarrassment and watch through our fingers, but we love it. The fact that sand can still get into the gears of a probity factory like the Oscars and grind the evening to a halt is proof that human error exists, that unpredictability exists — that drama exists.

Some people come to the Oscars for the gowns and the glitz, some to hiss the toffs, others to appreciate the efforts of the creative community. But all of us wait, in the secret corners of our pitch-black hearts, for the evening to go kerflooey in some awful, marvelous way.

And when the machinery shorts out in a kind of pop-culture electromagnetic pulse, as happened in the last minutes of Sunday’s ceremonies, it reveals the simple ordinariness of those present and everyone watching. There arose an immediate social media cottage industry devoted to studying the expressions of celebrities in the front rows of the Dolby Theatre, poring over and delighting in the upraised curve of the Rock’s eyebrow, the hand raised to Charlize Theron’s shocked mouth, David Oyelowo’s diplomatic eye roll.

This was evidence. Some of us plebes seem to expend an awful lot of energy hating famous Hollywood people — the angry, resentful comments under any online Oscar article will quickly fill your cup of bile to overflowing — but occasionally the barriers between the watchers and the watched break down and we’re in the soup together.

This occurred earlier in the evening, when Oscar host Jimmy Kimmel brought in a busload of tourists, an awkward bit of schtick that turned surreal as “real people’’ confronted “famous people’’ and seemed unable to put their cellphones down, holding their devices in front of them like combination crucifixes and video cameras. (No matter that the broadcast was going out across the planet; if it wasn’t on their phones, it couldn’t actually be happening.)

It occurred when Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty came onstage to present best picture at the evening’s end and fumbled through the opening and reading of the wrong card. This was supposed to be the capstone, the moment when our annual celebration of youth and beauty turned to the gorgeous couple of a half-century ago — to Bonnie and Clyde themselves, to the pop outlaws of a long-ago New Hollywood that rests peacefully (and missed) in the history books.

It would be cruel to say that Beatty and Dunaway looked confused and overmatched. It would be kinder to say they looked human and elderly — the latter being a concept that Hollywood, and movie stardom, and plastic surgery, and every facet of our neurotically youth-obsessed popular culture conspires and even exists to deny. Along with age, the fractious real world of politics and exclusion was largely banished from the evening, taking with it those nominees who chose not to attend (like “The Salesman’’ director Asghar Farhadi, who captured his second Oscar) or had problems entering the country (like the cinematographer of the documentary short winner “The White Helmets’’).

Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Even our Bonnies and Clydes must someday get old. Who knew that the PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants apparently keep two envelopes for each award backstage, supposedly part of a cover-all-entrances strategy that Sunday night turned into simon-pure stage farce? What will happen to the managing partner who gave the wrong envelope to the presenters? Will he be booted off the Oscar beat and get sent back to doing your Uncle Manny’s tax returns? Let us remember that accounting executives are human, too.

So the 89th Academy Awards gave us a big hit of entropic communications breakdown to go with all the glitz. In a world of corporate media conglomerates, where it’s hard to tell which is the commodity — us or what we watch — that’s entertainment. It may be the only entertainment in which it feels like something’s actually happening.

At the end of the evening, though, the Oscars were also about a little movie that could, and that did, and that is more than worthy of your time.

“Moonlight’’ was named best picture of 2016. If you had to pick one movie, this was and is an excellent choice, a story that hadn’t yet been told about people our culture trains us not to see. Above all, it’s a movie about the truths of being human, and in a culture that force-feeds us youthful perfection — and in an America that at the moment can’t even decide who’s human and who’s not — that is a most welcome thing indeed.

Ty Burr can be reached at ty.burr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.