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    For Stars at the Oscars, a Night of Celebration and Selfies

    The Academy Awards can be a fraught affair. When many of the world’s biggest stars gather to be validated for their artistry, the tension of parsing the winners from non-winners (not losers!) threatens to stultify the whole thing. But at Sunday night’s Oscars ceremony — where “Anora” (and Sean Baker) won big, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande belted big-hearted songs, and Adrien Brody kissed and was kissed — our photographer caught the stars in unguarded moments of joyful support and celebration throughout the night.Cynthia Erivo, whose rousing duet with Ariana Grande, “Defying Gravity,” opened the ceremony, waved to a familiar face in the Dolby Theater.Rumer Willis and Demi Moore, in the foreground, and Penélope Cruz and Lupita Nyong’o, middle, chatting as Isabella Rossellini looks on.Colman Domingo, with his husband, Raul Domingo, taking a selfie. Ariana Grande, left, enjoyed a moment with her “Wicked” co-star Bowen Yang, center, and Matt Rogers, who co-hosts “Las Culturistas,” a podcast, with Yang.Jeremy Strong, nominated for best supporting actor for his role in “The Apprentice,” was saluted in a speech by his “Succession” co-star Kieran Culkin, who won the award.Mikey Madison celebrated winning the award for best actress for her role in “Anora.” “This is a dream come true,” she said. “I’m probably going to wake up tomorrow.”The nominees for best actor — from left: Timothée Chalamet, Colman Domingo, Adrien Brody, Ralph Fiennes and Sebastian Stan — huddled for an impromptu photo shoot.Emma Stone, last year’s best actress winner for “Poor Things,” poked her tongue at a neighbor.Margaret Qualley embraced her husband, the music producer Jack Antonoff, during a break in the show.Adrien Brody kissed Daniel Blumberg for winning best original score for “The Brutalist.” On the red carpet before the show, Brody had been surprised by a kiss from Halle Berry, who recreated their smooch at the 2003 Oscars.Sean Baker made history Sunday night, tying Walt Disney for most individual Oscars collected in one night, with four. His film “Anora” won five, including best picture.Fernanda Torres, a best actress nominee for “I’m Still Here,” connected with Colman Domingo. She was the second Brazilian to ever receive a best acting nod. Her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, nominated in 1999, was the first.Jeff Goldblum, left, compared cellphones with his wife Emilie Livingston.Cynthia Erivo with Ralph Fiennes, who starred in “Conclave,” a film about the intrigue behind the selection of a new pope that received eight nominations.After his best actor win for “The Brutalist” was announced, Adrien Brody soaked in the moment. He then tossed his gum from the stage to his girlfriend Georgina Chapman.Ariana Grande with Ethan Slater, her co-star in “Wicked,” which was up for 10 Oscars.Demi Moore, left, reached across Margaret Qualley, her co-star in “The Substance,” to greet Qualley’s husband, Jack Antonoff. Moore, a nominee in the best actress category, lost to Mikey Madison. More

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    Why Demi Moore’s Oscar Loss to Mikey Madison Stings for Some Fans

    Moore had been considered a favorite for her strong performance in “The Substance,” but Madison won for “Anora.” Demi Moore snagged statuettes all through the awards season for her dynamic performance in “The Substance,” a film about the indignities women past 50 face in Hollywood. She was favored by many to win the Oscar for best actress.But when the envelope was opened on Sunday night Moore, 62, was passed over in favor of Mikey Madison, 25, who pulled an upset and won the best actress trophy for playing a sex worker in the film “Anora.”While Madison’s performance was widely praised, her unexpected victory left many admirers of Moore puzzled and saddened that it kept her from a perfect ending to her career comeback.On social media and on a subreddit dedicated to Moore’s upset, some fans suggested that her loss underscored one of the central themes of the film: the challenges older actresses face in a Hollywood that is obsessed with young women.One commenter noted that the academy had been observed in the past to “like young women and old men.” Another lamented: “Literally pouring all that brilliance on screen only for the younger actress who benefited from sex appeal and social hype to take that prestigious of an award from her.” Paolo Uggetti posted on social media that “Demi Moore losing to Mikey Madison is basically the plot of ‘The Substance.’” That post has been viewed more than five million times.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    What to Watch For at the Oscars: ‘Emilia Pérez,’ Cynthia Erivo and More

    From the most competitive races to the lasting controversies, here’s a guide to becoming an instant expert.The Best Picture Race Looks Wide OpenRalph Fiennes in “Conclave,” which is a top contender for the best picture Oscar. Its biggest competition: “Anora.”Focus FeaturesWhen the Ralph Fiennes-led papal thriller “Conclave” secured the highest honor at the 31st Screen Actors Guild Awards last weekend, it seemed like a strong indicator that it would prevail in the best picture category at the Academy Awards on Sunday night. After all, the last three winners of SAG’s top prize — “Oppenheimer,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “CODA” — all won the best picture statuette at the Oscars.But it isn’t exactly that clear cut.Those past three films had essentially swept their awards season, and aside from the SAG Awards, “Conclave” has won only one other best picture title, at the BAFTAs in February.“Anora,” the comedy-drama about a stripper (played by Mikey Madison) whose modern fairy-tale romance implodes, had several of the other early big wins this season, including two major industry prizes — from the Directors Guild of America and the Producers Guild of America — that almost always signal a best-picture Oscar up ahead.Also, Edward Berger, the director of “Conclave,” was not nominated for a best directing Oscar. Only six films in the history of the Oscars have won best picture without a best directing nomination, most recently “CODA” in 2022.Scandals Plague ‘Emilia Pérez’Karla Sofía Gascón in “Emilia Pèrez.” She is up for a best actress Oscar, but her chances of winning may have been derailed by recent scandals.Shanna Besson/NetflixJust a few weeks ago, “Emilia Pérez” was on top of the world. The Spanish-language musical out of France had earned 13 Oscar nominations, the most of any film this year (and nearly the most ever), and its lead, Karla Sofía Gascón, made history as the first openly transgender actress to be nominated for an Academy Award, in the best actress category no less.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How to Watch the Oscars 2025: Date, Time and Streaming

    Conan O’Brien will host the annual awards, which will be available to watch live on a streaming service for the first time.It seems like a lifetime ago that Sean Baker’s screwball comedy “Anora” first emerged as the favorite in the best picture race (no one was yet even thinking about holding space for “Wicked”).But we’re now right back where we started in the fall with both math and our Projectionist columnist, Kyle Buchanan, predicting that “Anora” will emerge triumphant. It’s by no means a sure thing — last weekend’s big Screen Actors Guild Awards winner, the papal thriller “Conclave,” could play spoiler.In the acting races, Demi Moore appears to be the one to beat after notching another win at the SAGs (though Buchanan says not to count out Fernanda Torres, who delivers a tour de force performance in the quiet Brazilian drama “I’m Still Here”).But could Adrien Brody, who plays a Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust in “The Brutalist,” be in for an upset from the 29-year-old Timothée Chalamet, who has embarked on a decidedly unconventional — and very online — Oscar campaign for his lead role in the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown”?Here’s everything you need to know.What time does the show start and where can I watch?This year’s show is again one for the early birds: The ceremony is set to begin at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles.On TV, ABC is the official broadcaster. Online, you can watch the show live on the ABC app, which is free to download, or at abc.com, though you’ll need to sign in using the credentials from your cable provider. There are also a number of live TV streaming services that offer access to ABC, including Hulu + Live TV, YouTube TV, AT&T TV and FuboTV, which all require subscriptions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Oscars 2025: There’s Something Weird About the Best Picture Nominees

    It’s entirely probable that scandal, gossip, politics and a general sense of “never heard of it before” have obscured something obvious and important about this year’s 10 best picture Oscar nominees. They’re weird — every single one. They take weird forms. The people in them do weird stuff. They induce weirdness in you.Demi Moore jabs herself with a goop known as “The Substance,” and out of her split-open back climbs Margaret Qualley, who refuses to obey the goop’s rules and proceeds to ruin their life. I paid to see this movie in a packed theater on a Saturday afternoon, where we laughed, screamed and almost threw up.Believe it or not, that movie’s a fairy tale, a funny one. So’s “Anora.” Here, the would-be princess is a Brooklyn stripper who marries a Russian nitwit whose oligarch father dispatches a goon squad to procure an annulment. If I told you “The Brutalist” ran for more than three hours and pitted a recent Holocaust survivor against his moneybags employer, maybe you’d ask which Oscar lab cooked this thing up. Then I’d have to tell you that the scale of this thing is so strangely intimate, so redolently personal, that it feels as much eavesdropped on as its premise sounds familiarly epic.A sugarless Brazilian dictatorship melodrama (“I’m Still Here”) is up against a sugar-encrusted American dictatorship musical (“Wicked”). “Conclave,” the pick-a-pope nail-biter, relies on so much shanking that it feels like a prison movie and features more cafeteria grandstanding than “Mean Girls.” For a spell, the front-runner had been “Emilia Pérez,” a musical fairy tale whose songs flout rhythm and melody, and whose Mexican cartel overlord mistakes her transness for sainthood. Then its star’s bigoted old tweets and some harsh comments by its mighty French director (about Mexicans and the Spanish they speak) turned the Oscar race into “Conclave.”Stellan Skarsgard plays the vindictive Baron Harkonnen in “Dune: Part Two,” a pretty weird blockbuster.Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros.Then, there’s “Dune: Part Two,” a movie so expensive looking, so smoothly, tastefully, artfully done that it’s easy to remain passive in the face of all that’s weird about it. But look! It’s Stellan Skarsgard, plumped, pursy and a-vape, as a baron whose kink, in part, arises from stadium-size gladiatoring. When this series is complete, many hours will have been spent watching Timothée Chalamet as the Chosen One amid a war over seasoning. It’s “Lawry’s of Arabia,” “Lost in Spice.” The race delivers double-feature Chalamet. In “A Complete Unknown,” he boldly reimagines Bob Dylan as a figure of tremendous petulance. Otherwise, it might be the most conventional thing you could hope to see about a once-in-a-lifetime weirdo; and that counts as kind of weird.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    There’s a New Kind of Woman Onscreen, Thanks to Women Behind the Camera

    Movies contain a multitude of bodies in different sizes, colors and muscle tones, bodies that are trim, bulky, parched, surgically altered. Talking about them, though, especially women’s bodies, can be understandably fraught. For some observers, writing about them is unnecessary and objectifying, even if a lot of other people — politicians, activists, influencers, Supreme Court justices — can’t stop talking about them. “We’re always talking about the feminine condition and the role of women,” the filmmaker Agnès Varda once said. “But I want to talk about the woman’s body, about our bodies.” I want to talk about them, too.That’s because some of the most memorable movies that I’ve seen lately are from female filmmakers who are also clearly thinking about women’s bodies and helping expand what kinds of women we are seeing onscreen. One such movie I keep returning to is Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl,” a recently released drama set on the frayed edges of Las Vegas. In a scene that keeps playing in my head, a cocktail waitress, Annette — played by a soulful Jamie Lee Curtis — climbs atop a small platform in the casino where she works and begins dancing. As slot machines ping around her, she slowly gyrates to the 1980s hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Annette looks like she’s in her own world. She looks glorious.Curtis, who’s 66, has said the scene shows the “degradation of women at the end of their lives,” adding, that “nobody cares.” Scarcely any casino patrons glance at Annette as she dances, true. But I did care, and I suspect I wasn’t alone. I get it, though; older women can feel invisible — I do. Yet here Curtis, who’s bathed in beautifully diffused light during the scene, the camera pointed up in seeming adulation, is mesmerizing as she shimmies and dips into a squat, her thighs tense and strong. I adored watching Curtis play Annette, and I think Coppola wants us to love this character as much as she clearly does. That is also glorious.Playing the cocktail waitress Annette, Jamie Lee Curtis is mesmerizing as she shimmies and dips in a scene from “The Last Showgirl.”Roadside Attractions“The Last Showgirl” touches on mothering, friendships, the commodification of beauty and the role that women play, willingly or not, in their own objectification. It explores how identity is partly created, sustained and jeopardized by the gaze of others, and what it means when women gaze — at others, at themselves — which puts the film in dialogue with recent movies like “Babygirl,” “Nightbitch” and “The Substance,” which received five Oscar nominations. The protagonist of “Showgirl” is Annette’s friend, Shelly (Pamela Anderson) a dancer whose revue is shuttering. Clouded with worry, Shelly — like Anderson, the character is 57 — is anxious about her future and sense of self. Who is she, after all, if no one looks at her?Anderson likes to be makeup free; away from work, so does her character. Shelly loves being a showgirl — “feeling beautiful, that is powerful” — but when she puts on her costume, she’s cosplaying an old-fashioned ideal of femininity. Onstage, she plays a fantasy. When she’s offstage, Shelly is a person with a life, everyday concerns and friends, mostly women, who look at one another with gazes that find common cause. Coppola sees the world of “The Last Showgirl” as a metaphor for the America dream, one in which commodified bodies come with expiration dates. It is also an emblem for women in film, who have long fought against their perceived disposability and continue to find common cause in female-driven work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How to Watch the SAG Awards

    In a wide-open best picture race, the awards, which are streaming on Netflix, could offer some clarity.This year’s Oscars best picture race is, for the first time in years, wide open.Will the newly ascendant front-runner “Anora,” Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner about a stripper who impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch, take the statuette? Will Brady Corbet’s epic “The Brutalist” find its way to the top? And what about the wild card, the papal thriller “Conclave,” which recently took top honors at the EE British Academy Film Awards, or BAFTAs — Britain’s version of the Oscars?With the days ticking down until the March 2 Academy Awards ceremony, the Screen Actors Guild Awards could offer some clarity. In four of the past five years, the SAGs have given their top honor — best ensemble — to the eventual Oscar winner.The 15 awards, which are voted on by actors and other performers who belong to the SAG-AFTRA union, honor the best film and television performances from the past year. The movie musical “Wicked” and the FX series “Shogun” are the leading nominees.Here’s how to watch, and what to watch for.What time does the show start, and where can I watch?The two-hour ceremony begins at 8 p.m. Eastern time (5 p.m. Pacific time) at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, a historic venue that has also hosted the Oscars. For the second year, the awards show will stream live and exclusively on Netflix; there is no way to watch without a subscription.Is there a red carpet?The red carpet preshow will stream live on Netflix beginning at 7 p.m. Eastern time (4 p.m. Pacific time). The YouTube star Lilly Singh and the actress and former “Saturday Night Live” comedian Sasheer Zamata will host the event, which will include interviews with nominees and the announcement of the winners in the best stunt ensemble categories.Who is hosting?Kristen Bell, who recently starred in the Netflix rom-com “Nobody Wants This,” will steer the ship. This will be her second time hosting; the first was in 2018.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Demi Moore, On the Verge of Her First Oscar

    Demi Moore is the star of one of the goriest, most audacious films ever nominated for an Oscar, the feminist body-horror satire “The Substance.” Onscreen, Moore, 62, dissolves and mutates in often grisly ways — nude, and in extreme close-up. And she could not be more self-actualized about it.The role required “wrestling with the flashes of my own insecurity and ego,” Moore explained. “I was being asked to share those things that I don’t necessarily want people to see.”She was speaking in a video interview last week, dressed in casual black and big glasses, twisting and tucking her legs under her, on her office couch, with every thought. Filming through that discomfort was a “gift — silver lining, blessing, whatever you want to call it,” she continued. “Once you put it all out there, what else is there? There’s nothing to hide. Being able to let go was another layer of liberation for me.” The following night, she won the Critics Choice prize for best actress.Her career and cultural resurgence is overdue, said Ryan Murphy, the showrunner and a friend who at long last convinced her to work with him in last year’s “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.” She had the beauty and aura of an old-school movie star, he said, with the professional discipline to match, but the flexibility of a seeker: “Game to do anything,” he said. “She’s a pathfinder. We all talk about what she’s done for the business and for other women.”“The universe told me that you’re not done,” Moore said in her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes, talking about her role in “The Substance” that has her on the verge of an Oscar.And, he added, “she is one of the most emotionally intelligent people that you’ll ever meet. Whenever I have an emotional dilemma or I need advice, I do not go to my shrink — I go to her.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More