Oscars 2025: Anora wins big, but Conan O’Brien pushes Academy Awards to wickedly funny, if super-long, heights | Canada Voices

Kicking off with a Wicked-sponsored tribute to the magic of the movies and ending with director/writer/editor/producer Sean Baker’s sex-work dramedy Anora taking home the top prize of the evening, the 97th Academy Awards offered more than its fair share of watercooler talking points during its approx. six-and-a-half-hour length. Before Conan O’Brien wastes any more of your precious time, The Globe and Mail presents the best, worst, and weirdest moments from the 2025 Oscars.

Defying Brevity

Breaking tradition, this year’s Oscars producers decided to skip performances from all the nominees for Best Original Song. Presumably, this was intended to shorten the evening. Yet the telecast still found time to include a nearly 10-minute opening performance from Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, whose tribute to the magic of movies-slash-Los Angeles eventually turned into a full-on ad for Wicked.

Conan the Barb-arian

When it was announced that Conan O’Brien would be taking over this year’s broadcast from longtime host Jimmy Kimmel, my eyebrows did a little squiggly dance of joy. Less frat-minded than Kimmel, more absurdist than someone like Jimmy Fallon, and apolitical to a fault, Conan (even in this newspaper, we go by the man’s first name, not his last) felt like a resetting of sorts for the Academy. And that’s exactly what happened during CoCo’s opening monologue. The closest that late-night television’s Mr. Nice Guy got to offending the room were two quick pokes at the season’s most (justifiably pilloried) star, Emilia Perez lead Karla Sofia Gascon — “Anora uses the F-word 479 times, which beats the record set by Karla Sofia Gascon’s publicist” — while managing to avoid the giant orange elephant in the room (Donald Trump) altogether.

While Conan could have slipped in just a little more acidity into his act — was an appearance from his old talk-show buddy Triumph the Insult Comic Dog too much to hope for? — he did manage to wrap the whole shtick together nicely. Up to and including his grand finale, a jaunty song-and-dance number called “I Won’t Waste Time” that was actually pretty swift in its execution — and more than a little reminiscent of his legendary Music Man-inspired Simpsons episode, “Marge vs. The Monorail.”

Quadruple Threat

Before Sunday night, no one had ever won four Academy Awards for one film. And yet, Anora’s Sean Baker broke that record without a sweat, taking home the Oscars for Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Director, and Best Picture (he’s the film’s producer alongside his Samantha Quan, and Alex Coco). Along the way, Baker took the time to thank the many sex workers he consulted on his dramedy, as well as remind the crowd that no one would be there without the power of movie theatres — a mini-manifesto that the Netflix executives in the room must have been thrilled to hear.

Succession Planning

After winning just about every precursor honour there was on this year’s awards circuit, A Real Pain’s Kieran Culkin triumphed at the Dolby Theatre as many expected, winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (which may or may not have been for a character based on The Globe and Mail’s own contributing writer Ben Kaplan). But the big drama was how Culkin’s victory lap paralleled that of his on-screen Succession sibling Jeremy Strong, who was also in the running for his performance as Trump fixer Roy Cohn in The Apprentice.

Well, to extinguish any whispers of Waystar Royco-like tension, Culkin opened his acceptance speech by gratefully thanking Strong. And then Culkin pivoted to something even more personal, cheekily reminding his wife Jazz Charton that she once promised him they could add two more kids to their family if he ever won an Oscar. “I have not brought it up once till just now!” he said. “I just have one thing to say to you, love of my life, ye of little faith: Let’s get cracking on those kids.”

Feeling Thankful

Perhaps there was something in the air inside the Dolby Theatre — or the fact that the ceremony was being held an hour earlier than usual — but the evening’s acceptance speeches were almost uniformly unique, passionate, inspiring, and rousing. From the filmmakers behind Best Animated Feature Flow gasping for breath after they essentially ran to the ceremony from the airport to Wicked’s costume designer Paul Tazewell noting that he was the first Black man to win in the category, nearly every winner genuinely had something to say. The mood felt genuinely celebratory, instead of its more typical dirge-like slouch toward the podium. Now if the producers could just do something about all those moments in-between the award announcements …

Double-Oh-No

Timing is everything, but someone should have told the Academy to maybe think twice before they shook and stirred the Bond franchise with an elaborate on-stage tribute to the series. Sure, the whole shtick was to spotlight the recent awarding of the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award to longtime 007 producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson. But the whole affair also arrived about a week after the step-siblings handed over creative control of their family’s birthright to Amazon, which hasn’t exactly proven itself to be a respectable steward of the feature film industry after gobbling up MGM a few years back. What’s more: it was only three years ago when the Academy Awards devoted a sizable amount of air time to marking the 60th anniversary of Bond. Not even James himself could abide such overkill.

Politically Speaking

Remarkably, there was only a brief and un-name-checked reference to Trump throughout the entire evening, courtesy of a quick Conan bit about Anora (“Americans are finally excited to see someone stand up to a powerful Russian”). But real-world politics burst through the Oscars bubble plenty of other times, from Darryl Hannah’s shoutout to Ukraine to Shirin Sohani and Hossein Molayemi, directors of the Best Animated Short In the Shadow of the Cypress, who spot-lit the plight of Iranians. But the biggest political moment by far arrived when the Israeli-Palestinian filmmaking collective behind No Other Land won Best Documentary Feature. The doc, which has still not secured distribution in the United States and Canada, traces the Israeli army’s dismantling of Palestinian villages in the occupied West Bank.

Taking the stage, the film’s Palestinian co-director Basel Adra decried the “harsh reality that we have been enduring for decades” in the West Bank, before urging the audience to “stop the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.” He was followed by his Israeli colleague Yuval Abraham, who called for the release of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, while also noting that America’s current foreign policy was “helping block the path” to peace in the region: “Why? Can’t you see that we are intertwined? That my people can be truly safe if Basel’s people are truly free and safe? There is no other way.” As of press time, the world has been so far spared any grammatically incoherent tweetstorm from the U.S. President.

The People’s Awards

The gala’s producers took special care to note the real-world backdrop to Hollywood’s biggest night when Conan prefaced the evening with a plea to remember that movies are made by countless artisans and craftsmen — many of whom lost their homes in the devastating California wildfires. But to give the message some extra oomph, Conan later brought up real-life L.A. firefighters to deliver a few pointed movie-biz jabs, including: “Our hearts go out to all of those who have lost their homes … and I’m talking about the producers of Joker 2.” That’s some five-alarm delivery.

Dead and Not Loving It

Whoever was behind the decision to soundtrack the show’s “In Memoriam” segment with the “Lacrimosa” movement of Mozart’s “Requiem,” perhaps the most ominous piece of “we’re all going to Hell” music ever composed — and most famously used in Milos Forman’s Amadeus, to say nothing of its power being upended in a classic scene in the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski — sure has a dark sense of humour. It was nice that the show was able to slip in Morgan Freeman’s quick ode to Gene Hackman, though.

Brutal Triumph

In his speech accepting the Best Actor statuette for The Brutalist, an emotionally overcome Adrien Brody — who earlier on the red carpet got some lip-locking payback from Halle Berry — touched upon the fleeting power of being an actor. “It can all go away,” the actor said, alluding to the performer’s somewhat fallow two-decade-plus stretch between his two Oscar wins, following 2002′s The Pianist. “Please turn the music off,” the actor continued as the orchestra swelled, “I’ve done this before … I’m here once again to represent the lingering traumas and repercussions of war and anti-Semitism and racism and othering. I pray for a healthier and happier and more inclusive world. If the past can teach us anything, it’s a reminder to not let hate go unchecked.”