Host Conan O’Brien unleashed an (almost) explicit attack on President Trump at Sunday night’s Academy Awards.
Early in the fourth hour of the show, Mr. O’Brien noted that “Anora” had been “having a good night” so far, winning two major awards — best editor and best original script — both prizes going to director Sean Baker.
“I guess Americans are excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian,” he said.
The entire auditorium gave a gasp of “he went there” recognition with some cheers and applause.
The plot of the movie has the titular stripper-prostitute marry the wastrel son of a powerful Russian oligarch after a whirlwind weekend.
The majority of the film concerns the oligarch and his wife’s efforts to dissolve the union, seeing Anora as a mere gold-digger. She refuses and spends more than an hour of the film resisting a group of semi-comic goons and then finally the oligarchic couple themselves.
Liberals have spent years saying that Mr. Trump is an agent, a stooge or at best merely a fanboy of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. Those claims have reached a fever pitch in the two days since Mr. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance got into a shouting match with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over U.S. aid to Ukraine and Mr. Putin’s trustworthiness.
To that point, the evening had avoided even such a thinly-veiled attack on Mr. Trump, although there had been politicking surrounding the Gaza conflict and oppression of Iranians by the theocratic government.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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