In the first award of the night, Keiran Culkin won the Oscar for best supporting actor for “A Real Pain,” an honor he received at almost every awards ceremony leading up to the 97th annual Academy Awards in Hollywood on Sunday.
“I have no idea how I got here, I’ve just been acting my whole life,” Culkin said after accepting the Oscar from presenter Robert Downey Jr. “This is just my trajectory.”
Culkin thanked Jesse Eisenberg, his costar-writer-and-director on “A Real Pain,” in his typically off-the-cuff rambling way.
“You’re a genius,” he told Eisenberg. “I would never say this to your face, so soak in it.”
Then, before the orchestra played him off, Culkin told another story about his wife Jaz, who he’d outed a year after winning a Golden Globe, for promising to have a third child with him if he won.
“After the show, we’re walking through the parking lot, and I turned to her, and I said, ‘Really, I want four,’” Culkin said as his wife laughed from the audience. “And she said, ‘I will give you four when you win an Oscar.’ Love of my life, ye of little faith.”
The Oscar telecast opened with a subtle tribute to Los Angeles in a montage of films set here that ranged from “La La Land” and “Chinatown” to “La Bamba” and “The Big Lebowski.”
After a shot of the ruby red slippers and Judy Garden’s voiceover saying, “There’s no place like home,” Ariana Grande, a nominee for “Wicked,” slipped onstage in a gown that featured its own red rubies on the bodice, singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from the original “Wizard of Oz.”
Her “Wicked” costar Cynthia Erivo succeeded her to sing “Home” from the 1978 Oz update “The Wiz,” before both Erivo and Grande joined to perform “Defying Gravity” from “Wicked” itself.
Conan O’Brien, making his Oscar-hosting debut, emerged from Demi Moore’s back – a sentence and a scene that only makes since if you’ve seen Moore in her best actress-nominated role in “The Substance” – and then dove back in to look for his shoe.
O’Brien delivered a traditional Oscar host monologue, riffing on the nominated films, the pronunciation of Ralph Fiennes’ first name, and the extraordinary number of very bad words in the best picture-nominated film “Anora.”
“I loved ‘Anora,’ I really did,” O’Brien said. “Little-known fact for you. ‘Anora’ uses the F-word 479 times. That’s three more than the record set by Karla Sofia Gascon’s publicist.”
The camera cut to Gascon, a best actress nominee for “Emilia Perez,” whose campaign was derailed when past tweets that contained offensive comments, surfaced.
O’Brien announced a few housekeeping rules: “If your acceptance speech goes too long, we won’t play you off, we’ll cut to John Lithgow in the crowd looking not angry, but slightly disappointed.” Cut to Lithgow, and yep, that look should do it.
O’Brien wrapped up with a sincere acknowledgment of the January wildfires in Southern California, noting that “in moments such as this, any awards show can seem self-indulgent and superfluous.
“Yes, we will honor many beautiful and talented A-list stars, but the Oscars also shines a light on many people you will never see,” he said, acknowledging “the hard-working men and women behind the camera who have devoted their lives to making film.”
Actually, then he wrapped up, singing a corny showbiz song about how he wasn’t going to waste time during the show, an old-fashioned Oscar bit, actually, that included a sandworm from “Dune 2” playing “Chopsticks” on a grand piano. Don’t ask, just go with it, we suppose.