Whoopi Goldberg would like to thank the Academy...for apologizing for her Oscar-night slight.
Three days after being left out of a montage highlighting past hosts—despite being not only the first female emcee, but the first black one as well—and two days after getting choked up about her televised absence on The View, Goldberg told E! News that the ceremony's longtime producer, Gil Cates, had personally phoned her to make amends for the gross oversight.
"Gil called yesterday and said, 'I would have called you Monday but I hadn't slept,' " she said, explaining the one-day lag time between her emotional episode and the subsequent apology. "He said, 'Listen, I missed it. I didn't realize it wasn't in there.' "
"They had a lot on their minds," she said, going on to cite two more exclusions from the montage-heavy 80th Annual Academy Awards, including a fellow former host and a notable "In Memoriam" absentee.
"They even missed Brad Renfro and Steve Martin. I love Gil. He was the one who came to me and said, 'I want to put you in as first female host of the Oscars, let's make history.' "
While Goldberg now seems more accepting of the slight, telling E! News, "It was an oversight. It happens," she was slightly less amenable to the Oscar-night oops during Monday's View.
When her fellow cohosts Joy Behar, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Barbara Walters and Sherri Shepherd brought up her absence on the morning-after episode and grew increasingly vocal about their colleague's slighting, Goldberg stayed mostly silent until Shepherd asked whether she had perhaps made someone over at Oscars HQ upset.
"Undoubtedly," she said. "Undoubtedly I pissed somebody off yet again. You know what, I don't—I don't know."
When the women then rallied around Goldberg, telling her they thought she was a great (four-time) host and rattled off a list of her Oscar highlights, the genuinely moved moderator told her cohosts, "This makes up for it."
She then got up from the desk and gave each of her fellow cohorts a kiss on the cheek.
"It moved me that they took time out to talk about it," Goldberg, who served as host in 1994, 1996, 1999 and 2002, told E! News. "Colleagues don't usually do that. I was moved. It was a big step for them. They could have ignored it."
But for all her history of televised firsts, Goldberg said that the View moment was the first time she ever got so unintentionally emotional on TV.
"I never get like that," she said. "I tried at first to laugh it off. They overwhelmed me, and that's the truth. And I didn't know how to deal with it. That is why I had to get up. I was thinking, 'I am not going to let this tear roll down my face.' I got up and kissed everyone to say, 'Thank you and stop!' It was just a lovely gesture on their part."
—Additional reporting by Ken Baker