Oscars crowd loudly reacts to Conan O’Brien joke about not being afraid to stand up to a powerful Russian
The subject of feature film “The Apprentice” has traditionally not been a fan of Hollywood.
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Oscars host Conan O’Brien made a joke about President Donald Trump’s cordial relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin during Sunday’s ceremony.
“You know, Anora is having a good night,” he said of the Mikey Madison-starring film. “Yeah, that’s great. That’s great news. Two wins already. I guess Americans are excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian.”
The audience knew what he meant, and they cheered loudly. The first-time Oscar host stood there for a few moments to soak up all the applause. O’Brien kept politics out of most of his quips. While O’Brien didn’t use Trump’s name, he didn’t need to.
The comedian’s jab came shortly after Trump said on his social media platform, Truth Social, “We should spend less time worrying about Putin, and more time worrying about migrant rape gangs, drug lords, murderers, and people from mental institutions entering our Country – So that we don’t end up like Europe!”
Throughout his time in politics, Trump has been known for — and criticized by opponents because of — his ties to the Russian president.
Trump wasn’t at the ceremony, as the president has expressed disdain for much of the show business community; however, the film about the early years of his career, The Apprentice, was up for two awards. It lost both. Best Actor nominee Sebastian Stan lost out to Adrien Brody for The Brutalist, and Best Supporting Actor Nominee Jeremy Strong, who plays Roy Cohn, was beat by A Real Pain’s Kieran Culkin.
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Not that Trump was a fan of the controversial movie. Quite the opposite, in fact, and he was very vocal about his feelings. Trump had called it “fake and classless” after the Ali Abbasi-directed movie was released widely in theaters in October, according to ABC News. “It’s a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job, put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election, to try and hurt the Greatest Political Movement in the History of our Country, ‘MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!'” he wrote.
O’Brien, who was hosting the show for the first time, kept most of his focus on the night’s nominees. He wasn’t the only participant making political statements, however. Daryl Hannah voiced a pro-Ukraine battle cry when she took the stage to present the award for Best Film Editing.
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The main Oscars takeaway? Hollywood is as scared of the world right now as you and I are
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he Oscars ceremony on Sunday night was long and boring, as it has been for a few years, but this year its shortcomings landed differently. Hollywood’s waning influence, which registered most glaringly last month in the large number of American nominees who showed up in London for – not something they were inclined to do in better times – gave the ceremony a sense of low-stakes irrelevance that was frankly a relief from the rest of the news cycle. Still, the question lingers as to why the actors and presenters largely, and mercifully in my view, stayed away from mention of Donald Trump.
After the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles in January, the classy thing to have done this year would’ve been to cancel or at least radically downsize the Oscars ceremony, but of course no one involved was going to vote for that. Instead, audiences were treated to a muted spectacle celebrating movies with record-breakingly small box-office returns, including , in which Adrien Brody relived the US postwar construction boom in real time, and Anora, one of the lowest-grossing best pictures of all time, about an exotic dancer who . (What could be behind the deep and abiding fascination of straight male directors – and novelists, and podcasters – with the “”? That’s right, it’s altruism.)
In 2017, in the wake of Trump’s first ascent to the presidency, there were many fiery speeches from the Oscars podium, among them Jimmy Kimmel’s opening monologue, which was dominated by Trump content; a defence of immigrants led by the actor Gael García Bernal; and the director Barry Jenkins entreating those in need of help to . This year, by contrast, there was almost nothing: a decent Anora-related joke by the host, Conan O’Brien, about Americans being “excited to see somebody ”. The actor Zoe Saldaña referring pointedly to her immigrant parents. And some criticism of the US government by the Israeli-Palestinian team behind No Other Land, the winner of best documentary.
There is also the question of Hollywood’s role in the collapse of the Democratic vote. This is probably delusional thinking, but there may have been a grain of humility – or at least of self-interested awareness – in the decision by wave after wave of Oscar-winning actors on Sunday not to use the podium to make political points. Looking back at the Kamala Harris campaign, which relied heavily on A-list Hollywood support, the conviction that celebrities swing votes or win hearts has never been less popular or assured. Some in the auditorium on Sunday may even still be in recovery from the failure of Time’s Up (remember that?), a dog’s breakfast of a movement in which Hollywood’s leading ladies leveraged their fame for an admirable cause that somehow ended up with Amy Schumer mugging for attention on the Capitol steps.
Perhaps all the Ozempic in the room had made people light-headed. Perhaps the lack of politics was pregamed. Producers said ahead of the ceremony that the telecast would focus on the ways in which film-making requires “community and collaboration”, which sounds a bit like Jeff Bezos’s on the op-ed pages of the Washington Post. Only the actor Daryl Hannah, who managed to throw a V-sign and say: “Slava Ukraine!” to cheers from the crowd, failed to get the memo.
The takeaway is that, in Hollywood as elsewhere, people are scared, not only because Trump is petty and vindictive but also because the vast uncertainty of the world we’re suddenly in can make judicious silence seem more sensible than speeches. Where that tips into capitulation – and whether Hollywood, like the tech and media industries, will give us our era’s version of Leni Riefenstahl – remains to be seen.
