In his own unique words, the One Battle After Another actor made it clear there is no one he won’t reject for a fan photo – and revealed the real reason he skipped the Oscars

One of the highlights of this year’s Oscars was Sean Penn’s win for best supporting actor. Not because he deserved it – although in truth he probably did – but because he didn’t turn up, which simultaneously made the ceremony a little bit shorter and spared the world a Sean Penn acceptance speech.

At the time, much was made about the reason for Penn’s absence. Since he spent Oscars night in Ukraine, the leading theory was that he was making a profound point about the frivolity of backslapping awards shows during times of tangible crisis. Turns out that isn’t quite the case, though. Sean Penn skipped the Oscars because he hates selfies. We’ll get to the exact quote in a minute, and you should probably brace yourself for it, but he really, really hates selfies. A lot.

Stand By Me co-stars Wil Wheaton and Jerry O’Connell joined Billy Crystal and a dozen other stars on stage at the Academy Awards to pay tribute to the film’s director

Stand By Me star Corey Feldman has said he was sorry to be omitted from the tribute to Rob Reiner at the Oscars earlier this month.

At the start of the Academy Awards’ in memoriam section, Billy Crystal took to the stage to pay extended tribute to the writer and director and his wife, photographer Michele, who were killed in December.

All the talk on red carpet night was of leading guys such as Adrien Brody and Leonardo DiCaprio flashing the bling

While the eyes might be the window to the soul, lapels are certainly doing some talking. On the Oscars red carpet last Sunday night, Hollywood’s leading men flashed a lot of bling on their suits.

From Adrien Brody who wore an astronomically large brooch titled Ulysses, arguably as big as the James Joyce tome is thick, to a clean-shaven Pedro Pascal, who distracted from his newly bare chin with a silk and feather Chanel Camélia brooch, lapels were vying for the spotlight.

A dumpster-diving TikToker struck gold the morning after the Academy Awards. But why are they binning carpets after one brief use? And where can we find the uneaten chocolate Oscars?

The Oscars are over, and the world has moved on. No longer are we debating the merits of any particular film, or the validity of any given win. Now there are only two sets of people who care about the Oscars; the agents of the winners, who are all busy renegotiating their clients’ contracts, and amateur Los Angeles-based carpet fitter Paige Thalia.

Thalia found a small amount of viral fame this week, after she discovered the Oscars red carpet languishing in a skip the morning after the ceremony, and decided to kit out her home with it.

The actor skipped Academy Awards ceremony to travel to Ukraine, where he was presented with alternative prize

Sean Penn has been presented with an Oscar fashioned from the metal of a Ukrainian railway carriage damaged by Russian missiles.

The statue, which is flat, silver and shaped like an Academy Award, was given to him by Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, CEO of Ukrainian railways, who told him: “You’re missing Oscars, so we made this one.”

The response follows social media footage of the One Battle After Another actor remonstrating with a member of security during the ceremony

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has responded to the complaint by Oscar nominee Teyana Taylor over the behaviour of a security guard who manhandled her in the closing moments of the ceremony.

In footage that circulated on social media after the telecast on Sunday, Taylor can be heard telling someone off-camera that they are “a man putting your hands on a female. You’re very rude. Very rude.”

Fonda, who was in four films with Redford, playfully asked why the singer was chosen to give the in memoriam speech for the late actor

Jane Fonda has said she wishes she could have fronted the tribute to Robert Redford at Sunday night’s Academy Awards, rather than Barbra Streisand.

Speaking on the red carpet at an Oscars afterparty, Fonda told a red carpet reporter: “I want to know how come Streisand was up there doing that for Redford?” The actor then playfully added that while Streisand “only made one movie with him, I made four … I have more to say.”

The diversified Academy and a mutating industry have changed what many had come to expect from the stuffy, rule-following Oscars

Last year, as the major fall film festivals took place around the world, it was hard to make out the sound of audience applause. It wasn’t an attendance issue or that booing was heard instead (that’s solely a Cannes response), it was that, for many, hands were too busy wringing to find time to clap.

The trifecta of Venice, Telluride and Toronto was once seen as an inescapable fixture on a film’s road to the Oscars. Best picture winners such as 12 Years a Slave, Spotlight, Birdman, Moonlight, The Shape of Water and Green Book all rose within that circuit and cemented their reception at festivals and world premieres and often felt judged for awards potential over quality. But over the past few years, as the Academy has changed and diversified its voting body and as the industry has changed in so many other ways, something has shifted. Winning films have come from Cannes, Sundance, SXSW and, most shockingly, no festival at all …

From The Wire to Fruitvale Station, Creed, Black Panther, the Academy award winner has amassed a body of work that straddles commercial and critical success
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Michael B Jordan’s best actor Oscar places him in an exclusive club. Only five black actors have won the award before. He now sits on a list that includes Will Smith, Jamie Foxx, Forest Whitaker, Denzel Washington and Sidney Poitier, the first black winner for Lilies of the Field in 1964.

But less than a month ago, it seemed unlikely. Jordan’s success at the Actors awards was the first serious hint that he could beat Timothée Chalamet, who had won at the Golden Globes and was the frontrunner for much of the awards campaign. But Chalamet, who made a few missteps on the campaign trail, was up against one of the most well-loved actors operating in Hollywood. Jordan is someone who at only 39 years old has managed to amass a body of work that straddles commercial and critical success.

Recognition for Scandi film-making has long focused on Sweden and Denmark but critics say Norwegian film is entering a new era

Sentimental Value’s victory at the Oscars on Sunday has been hailed in Norway as the moment the country stepped out of the film industry shadow cast by its Scandinavian neighbours Sweden and Denmark.

Joachim Trier’s film became the first ever Norwegian feature to win an Academy Award when it was named best international film at the ceremony in Los Angeles.

Politicians express joy and pride and thousands of Buckley masks reportedly being printed for St Patrick’s Day

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Jessie Buckley’s Oscar win has uncorked delight across Ireland and prompted an early start to St Patrick’s Day celebrations.

Politicians, artists and commentators expressed joy and pride after waking up on Monday to images of the Kerry actor clutching the statuette for best actress in Los Angeles.

The One Battle After Another star’s failure to collect his best supporting actor award – because he was visiting Ukraine – only serves to burnish his reputation

Last night’s Oscars might have been superficially modern (K-pop! Female cinematographers winning things! Jokes about YouTube interstitial advertising!), but there was one slightly charming old throwback: Sean Penn wasn’t there to collect his best supporting actor award.

Sure, this sort of thing happens all the time in other awards shows – you can barely get through a single Baftas without an A-lister revealing that they didn’t fancy braving the London winter – but not the Oscars. The Oscars are meant to represent the pinnacle of professional achievement. It’s your one chance to look all of your peers in the eye as one in the knowledge that you are better than the lot of them. Who’d turn down an opportunity that irresistible?

Why did Brigitte Bardot, Farrah Fawcett and James Van Der Beek not warrant a mention when Michael Jackson did? The history of the Oscars tribute snubs says a lot about why some stars are gone but not forgotten

The Oscars in memoriam segment is a firmly lodged Academy tradition – albeit one that is not as longstanding as you might think, having only been introduced in 1994. Almost as established a tradition is that of the outcry following a major film industry figure being omitted from the segment. This year seemed particularly notable in that regard, with Brigitte Bardot, TV stars James Van Der Beek and Malcolm-Jamal Warner, and the celebrated Bollywood actor Dharmendra among those left out, to varying levels of outrage on social media.

Critics of these omissions will usually imply they are down to forgetfulness or neglect on the part of the Academy. Such claims, though, overlook the fact that the in memoriam process is a painstaking one, adjudicated on by a committee tasked with whittling a longlist of hundreds down to a final list of around 30. As Bruce Davis, former executive director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences told the LA Times in 2010, the process “gets close to agonising by the end. You are dropping people who the public know. It’s just not comfortable.”

KPop Demon Hunters fans screamed with glee, Adrien Brody grossed out the audience and Timothée Chalamet broke all the rules. The Guardian’s film critic on a gobsmackingly glamorous ceremony

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These were the Oscars for a life during wartime. President Trump’s still-to-be-explained attack on Iran meant warnings of a possible retaliatory drone attack from Tehran on the target-rich environment of downtown Los Angeles. The glittering Dolby Theatre was reportedly in the crosshairs.

It didn’t happen. But this was a ceremony aware of the distant politics of threat, and the politics of a nation that is rich enough to afford war and peace at the same time.

The red carpet raises all kinds of questions. What is the age range of a feather boa? Sequins: mutton or lamb? In the face of the carping and scrutiny, Paltrow has issued a bold sartorial retort

The 50s are an awkward decade for women on the red carpet. So, the Oscars, being the ultimate red carpet, are like a dramatisation of the awks, a silent movie told in One Dress After Another. It’s complicated by the convention that “over 50” and “in her 50s” are the same category for Hollywood, the existence of a greater age being so anathema to the condition of womanhood that it’s more tactful not to mention it. Sigourney Weaver (76) is an “Oscars over 50”, as is Goldie Hawn (80).

The case of Hawn was particularly confusing this year. When she was pictured alongside her daughter, Kate Hudson (46), they became the same age, it being semantically easier to pretend that “nearly-50 to 100” is a continuous phase of woman than to brook the idea of an age beyond “middle”.

Audiences were gradually turned off by the Marty Supreme actor during his Oscars campaign trail, with the growing sensation that he was more like his smirking, fame-hungry character than they first imagined
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Has any actor worked so hard with such little result as Timothée Chalamet this Oscars campaign? When everything is totted up, the tally will surely suggest so: thousands of air miles and tiny orange ping-pong balls expended, but no gold statuette, as both he and his film Marty Supreme were shut out entirely of this year’s Academy Awards.

For so long Chalamet’s grand tour looked a work of wide-eyed gonzo genius. It started with a “leaked” Zoom call comedy skit where the 30-year-old pitched increasingly absurd promotional ideas for his new film Marty Supreme – breakfast cereal tie-ins! Blimps! Painting the Eiffel tower the same violent orange as the ping-pong balls in the film! – to an audience of nervously nodding marketing execs. The skit was preposterous, sure, but also a tiny bit predictive of the actual campaign. The Eiffel tower might not have been painted orange, but the blimp took off, and so did Chalamet. Broadcast across every medium, from Insta to old-fashioned network TV, appearing in just about every country, aimed at every audience – sports bros, thespians, fans of half-forgotten, foghorn-voiced talent show winners – he projected a confident ubiquity dialled down just a few notches from his character: brilliant, striving, a little insufferable.

Its wins are a testament to Ryan Coogler’s vision. His highly personal film foregrounds the Black experience and its essential humanity is a lesson for us all
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Congratulations to the Sinners camp on its Oscar night triumphs – affirmation that cinema can be deep and entertaining at the same time. It might not have swept the major awards as some of us had hoped, but it is still a personal victory for Ryan Coogler, and also the validation that Black cinema has long been denied. And despite handling heavy themes of racist violence, Sinners will probably be remembered by history as a message of hope and unity in a turbulent era.

Nobody could argue that Coogler’s film didn’t deserve its success. Sinners is a complete, unified, all-round work of art. Everything seems to be in tune: the story, the performances (not least Michael B Jordan’s technically demanding dual role – justly rewarded with the best actor Oscar), the music, the costumes , the production design, the visuals (a boundary-smashing award for Autumn Durald Arkapaw – the first woman and the first Black winner of the best cinematography Oscar). Sinners’ record 16 nominations and four wins were confirmation that the Academy agreed.

As One Battle After Another swept the Academy Awards, Paul Thomas Anderson, Javier Bardem and Conan O’Brien gave a welcome reality check to the glitzy ceremony

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In his opening monologue to the 98th Academy Awards, host Conan O’Brien issued a note of caution to easily offended viewers.

“I warn you, tonight could get political,” O’Brien said. “If that makes you uncomfortable, there’s an alternative Oscars being hosted by Kid Rock at a Dave & Buster’s down the street.”

In a year that largely stuck to script, host O’Brien’s antics and the It Was Just an Accident director’s stare at Kevin O’Leary got the internet talking

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Jafar Panahi, the Iranian political dissident and director of the excellent film It Was Just an Accident – a best international feature nominee from France, as it was made without the permission of the Iranian government – looked, well, not impressed by Shark Tank judge and Marty Supreme castmember Kevin O’Leary on the red carpet. If there’s one moment that transcended the Oscars this year, it’s this dead stare.

The great, the good and the glamorous headed this year to aftershow parties including the Governors Ball dinner and the Vanity Fair bash at the LA County Museum of Art. Here are our pick of images from the evening

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