Oscars TV Review: Conan O’Brien Nails It In Hosting Debut On A Night Of Celebration For Cinema, L.A. & Gene Hackman
More than we’ve seen in a while and with a spry 81-year-old Mick Jagger in the house brimming with Bob Dylan jokes, Sunday’s Conan O’Brien-hosted 97th Oscars was a celebration of cinema and the home of Hollywood. Building on last year’s show’s long-overdue efforts to be both traditional and forward leaning, this year had few of the annoying gimmicks of recent Academy Awards and no direct mention of Donald Trump.
It was, a misplaced James Bond franchise tribute here or there, all about the movies after rather rocky campaigns and an unpredictable awards season. In the end, the Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress wins and two more for Anora, its mastermind Sean Baker and star Mikey Madison concluded an Oscars that was near pitch-perfect from the drop.
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That emphasis was made fact when, late in the show, Morgan Freeman walked out to offer a eulogy of sorts to the “giant” Gene Hackman before the In Memoriam portion of the show. “Rest in peace, my friend,” the Oscar winner offered to his “dear friend,” his two-time co-star and two-time Oscar winner Hackman, who was discovered dead with his wife Betsy last week in circumstances still not resolved.
An even later tribute to Honorary Oscar recipient Quincy Jones in the show from The Color Purple stars Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey with Queen Latifah singing “Ease on Down the Road” from The Wiz had a similar resonance for the room and the industry.
Taking the big-picture view, it certainly didn’t hurt tonight’s Oscars that Wicked stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo came out on stage individually to sing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ and The Wiz’s “Home” to kick off the 4 p.m. PT/7 p.m. ET-starting show. Even before the nominated duo joined together to sing “Defying Gravity” from the Jon M. Chu-helmed Wicked, it was standing ovation time.
After the Los Angeles wildfires added to production slowdowns and job losses, Hollywood’s biggest afternoon was exactly one of many resets this town needed. Overall, tonight’s show produced by Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan was so fun and loose that even a less-than-stellar pre-recorded backstage Substance bit from “four-time Oscar viewer” O’Brien couldn’t derail things.
There was some additional joy for a true slugger when a “let’s fight for what’s right”-declaring Adrian Brody also took home his second Oscar with a Best Actor win for The Brutalist.
Even with Emilia Pérez’s wins tonight for Zoe Salda?a as Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Song, Netflix may not have found a pre-recorded and very tongue-planted-in-check “CinemaStreams” bit very funny. However, with glitches galore hitting Hulu’s livestream of the Oscars, the Martin Scorsese-cameoed skit about an alternative to “streaming moves from your couch, your kitchen and your hand” in “a building that’s dedicated to streaming movies” sure landed well with those in the Dolby Theater and those at home who still love the collective experience of film. That self-declared “battle cry” was reinforced by Anora helmer Baker in his Best Director speech right near the end of the almost four-hour telecast.
Perhaps more telling, the “CinemaStreams is a trademark of Conan O’Brien in partnership with the Sackler family and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” end credit may have been almost the most overtly political the Oscars got tonight.
Sure, O’Brien’s crack that “Anora is having a good night. Two wins already. I guess Americans are excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian,” was clearly a Trump dig without saying the Putin-friendly Republican’s name. Yet, with the exception of Brutalist star Brody’s cry against hate and antisemitism, plus antiwar and occupation remarks from Palestinian-Israeli No Other Land filmmakers upon winning Best Documentary – remarks met with repeated applause in the Dolby – the politics of the 2025 Oscars were local and personal, especially coming out on an election that saw the Hollywood-backed Kamala Harris lose.
To that, the emergence onstage at the two-and-a-half-hour mark of firefighters who battled the January blazes that destroyed much of Pacific Palisades and Altadena gave the A-lister crowd a chance to really let loose with a roaring, bipartisan standing ovation. Burning box office bomb Joker 2, Timothée Chalamet’s singing range and O’Brien himself, the trio of jokes told by the firefighters got big big laughs.
In his first stint as host, former NBC late-nighter O’Brien actually did bring some much needed and sometimes self-deprecating energy to the Oscars, especially in a year that didn’t see any blockbusters among the Best Picture nominees.
It was partially a case of running on adrenaline.
As recently as February 28, O’Brien made a surprise appearances at the Largo at the Cornet down on La Cienega Boulevard to test drive some of his monologue material to applause. Doubt the hilarious “ball’s in your court, Estonia” was one of those lines before Latvia’s Flow won the Eastern European nation its first Academy Award tonight, but it sure landed well with the black-tie crowd, more than once.
Also, it didn’t hurt that the quick-footed O’Brien had a little non-verbal help from John Lithgow and a very verbal and inappropriately attired Adam Sandler (channeling his best John Fetterman) in his monologue, and later announcer of the night Nick Offerman. But hey, it takes a village, right?
Addressing the “devastating ordeal” of “wildfire and divisive politics” that L.A. has been through, O’Brien made sure to spotlight the “hardworking men and women behind the camera” and the power of cinema. The notoriously apolitical host then got down to business and launched into a Deadpool-cameoed musical routine promising not to waste time
With a nicely mashed-up run of show, Robert Downey Jr was on stage next to hand out the Best Supporting Actor Oscar – which went to Kieran Culkin, as many expected, and the show was off to the races.
Of course, the Oscars being the Oscars, it was almost 30 minutes in before the first award was handed out in a show that ran 3 hours and 46 minutes. The Oscars also being the Oscars, can someone continue with the new-blood adrenaline and please sign Culkin up to host in 2026? No disrespect to Conan, and we all knew from Succession that the A Real Pain star had great comic timing, but his acceptance speech, and his forgiving wife’s reaction, was fantastic.
All of which is to say, if they could just cut the running time down to less time than it takes to fly to Vancouver and get through customs, the once-dusty Oscars is looking pretty good closing in on its 100th birthday. And that, to quote that other Rolling Stones leader Keith Richards, is as wicked as it seems.
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