Oscars 2025: How to Watch the Ceremony and Live From E! Red Carpet

Unsurprisingly, hosting the 2025 Oscars fit Conan O'Brien like a golden glove.

The perennially youthful 61-year-old had a plethora of topics to choose from to kick off the funny March 2 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles—Best Actor nominee Timothée Chalamet channeling Bob Dylan, Emilia Pérez drama, drastic lengths to prevent aging as seen in The Substance, The Brutalist's 215-minute running time (really long movies, always a classic)—and sure enough he touched on all of it.

He started, in a pre-taped bit, by crawling out of Demi Moore in a nod to The Substance, then joking about his lack of plastic surgery. The Best Actress nominee agreed, once O'Brien got to the stage, that their intimate action was indeed a bit "awkward." (See all the stars from the 2025 Oscars red carpet.)

And as O'Brien ticked through the most honored and talked about movies of the year, he acknowledged that Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón, a history-making Best Actress nominee, was in attendance after her awards season hit a snag.

His hosting gig was announced back in November, and he lost both of his parents the following month, his 95-year-old dad Thomas O'Brien and 92-year-old mom Ruth O'Brien dying within three days of each other.

O'Brien also acknowledged having to throw out the usual ba-dum-dum playbook once wild fires tore through L.A.'s Pacific Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods in January, destroying thousands of structures. He has been living in a hotel since his family was forced to evacuate from their home in the Palisades, while his longtime assistant and podcast sidekick Sona Movsesian lost her house in the Eaton fire.

“The strategy is my writers and I and the team that I’m working with at the Oscars, who are fantastic, the producers, everyone, we’ve got all of our sensors out,” O'Brien told The Hollywood Reporter toward the end of January. “I couldn’t tell you right now what the show is going to be. We have a million ideas, but which ones will we use? What’s going to be appropriate? What’s the right tone? Like I said, the tone might shift somewhat. You never know one way or the others."

Of course, that's where being in show business for almost 40 years comes in handy.

"Nothing’s in stone,” he told the NY Times less than a week before the Oscars. “I’m leaving every possibility on the table. I have choices right now, and we’ll see what happens.”

Conan O'Brien kept it classic in a simple black tuxedo to kick off the show, and keep scrolling to see the all the red carpet fashion at the 2025 Oscars: