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

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...

‘One of the most vicious people of our century’: Maria Bakalova on Donald Trump – and playing Ivana in The Apprentice

Her breakout role in the Borat sequel grabbed attention after a scene with Rudy Giuliani on a bed. Now she’s playing Trump’s ex-wife in a controversial biopic – but insists it’s not a political film

The week Maria Bakalova was asked to consider playing Ivana Trump for the new film The Apprentice, she was in New York filming something else. With the meeting scheduled for her one day off, she spent the evening before trying to channel Donald Trump’s first wife. The film is set in the 70s and 80s, so she spent hours wading through photos of Ivana in that era. “A lot of makeup, a lot of hair,” she says. Bakalova laughs as she remembers spending the evening experimenting with a mushroom-like hairstyle and “heavy eyeliner with a lot of powder, like inches”, although she didn’t have an Ivana-esque wardrobe – “Am I gen Z or a millennial?” asks the 28-year-old. Either way, “We wear a lot of baggy clothes”, so she chose her most skintight outfit.

She met the director Ali Abbasi in the middle of the day, feeling a little clownish in her Ivana cosplay. They spoke for a couple of hours, “about people growing up in post-communist countries – because [Ivana] was from Czechoslovakia, and I was born and raised in Bulgaria – which shapes your inner world, your thoughts. We talked a lot about the similarities of our stories.”

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