Conan O’Brien jokes about Ted Sarandos, Timothée Chalamet and ‘frightening times’ in Oscars monologue

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Host bobs and weaves through a number of third-rail topics in Academy Awards speech that’s at turns silly and sincere Oscars 2026 – follow the action live! The winners: the full list – updating live Conan O’Brien’s opening monologue at the 98th Academy Awards cheekily paid tribute to many nominated films – and then some – while acknowledging the tense US political situation and cracks at Timothée Chalamet, Amazon and US healthcare. After a snappily edited, old-school montage in which O’Brien, dressed as best supporting actress winner Amy Madigan ’s character in Weapons (“I look like Bette Davis with lupus,” he joked), stormed through each of the nominated films trailed by children à la Weapons, the second-time host bobbed and weaved through a number of pressing topics, from political divides to AI to Jeffrey Epstein. “I am Conan O’Brien, and I am honored to be the last human host of the Academy Awards,” he quipped. “Next year it’s going to be a Waymo in a tux.” Continue read...
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Napoleon review – Joaquin Phoenix makes a magnificent emperor in thrilling biopic

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Ridley Scott dispenses with the symbolic weight attached to previous biopics in favour of a spectacle with a great star at its centre

Many directors have tried following Napoleon where the paths of glory lead, and maybe it is only defiant defeat that is really glorious. But Ridley Scott – the Wellington of cinema – has created an outrageously enjoyable cavalry charge of a movie, a full-tilt biopic of two and a half hours in which Scott doesn’t allow his troops to get bogged down mid-gallop in the muddy terrain of either fact or metaphysical significance, the tactical issues that have defeated other film-makers.

Scott cheekily imagines Napoleon firing on the pyramids in the Egyptian campaign as well as witnessing the execution of Marie Antoinette (but not the humiliation of Louis XVI by the Tuileries mob, which he might actually have seen). Out of deference moreover, Scott and his screenwriter David Scarpa suppress all mention of Napoleon’s reintroduction of slavery into the French colonies. But above all, there’s a deliciously insinuating portrayal of the doomed emperor from Joaquin Phoenix, whose derisive face suits the framing of a bicorne hat and jaunty tricolour cockade. Phoenix plays Napoleon as a military genius and lounge lizard peacock who is incidentally no slouch on horseback. Others might show Napoleon as a dreamy loner, but for Scott he is one half of a rackety power couple: passionately, despairingly in love with Vanessa Kirby’s pragmatically sensual Josephine. Scott makes this warring pair the Burton and Taylor of imperial France.

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