Was Adam Sandler’s skit at the Oscars about Ukraine?
“For such a prestigious night, it’s important that everyone is properly dressed.” So begins Conan O’Brien’s skit at the Oscars from last weekend. Turning to the crowd of gowned and tuxedoed luminaries of the film industry, he stops short. “Adam, what are you wearing?” he adds as the camera pans to the audience, where Adam Sandler, Happy Gilmore himself, is seated behind Da’Vine Joy Randolph, wearing dark blue basketball shorts and a light blue hoodie.
“Nobody even thought about it until you brought it up!” Sandler shoots back.
It’s a silly moment, in keeping with the rest of the ceremony. The Oscars kept it light this year despite a scandal-ridden awards season and a precarious political moment. O’Brien toed the line, taking light jabs at disgraced Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón and joking that the ‘Best Picture’ winner Anora must have been a breath of fresh air for Americans who are “excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian”.
However, when you break down the exchange with Sandler, that seemingly innocuous riff about the actor’s casual attire might have been the most political joke of the evening. “You know what, Conan? I like the way I look cuz I’m a good person,” Sandler continues, rising from his seat. “I don’t care about what I wear or what I don’t wear. Did my snazzy gym shorts and fluffy sweatshirt offend you so much that you had to mock me in front of my peers?”
O’Brien weakly apologises, but Sandler isn’t interested. “I’m leaving. I have to,” he says. Turning to the audience, he adds, “It’s not you, no it’s not you, it’s him he’s the one you caused this. You are all welcome to join me for a game of five-on-five basketball at Veteran Park tonight at midnight.”
Just before turning around and walking out of the theatre, he says, “One more thing: Chalamet!” And runs down the aisle to embrace ‘Best Actor’ nominee Timothée Chalamet, who is dressed all in yellow.
Is it a coincidence that, less than a week after Donald Trump and JD Vance threw a hissy fit in the Oval Office about Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy not wearing their definition of formal attire, the same should happen at the Oscars? In the exchange at the White House, a far-right reporter asked the president, “Why don’t you wear a suit? You’re at the highest level in this country’s office, and you refuse to wear a suit. Do you own a suit? A lot of Americans have problems with you not respecting the dignity of this office.”
In response, Zelenskyy said, “I will wear a costume after this war will finish.”
The most striking thing about the O’Brien/Sandler skit isn’t that it mimicked this exchange in at least a passing way but that when the actor stopped and hugged Chalamet, his all-blue outfit and Chalamet’s all-yellow outfit created the colour scheme of the Ukrainian flag. Sandler’s deviation to hug the actor didn’t fit easily with the flow of his exit. He had to pause, turn around, and interrupt his own riffing to say, “One more thing”. In other words, it looked extremely deliberate, even if the embrace was brief.
All of this might seem pretty circumstantial (Sandler is known for preferring loungewear to tuxedos, after all), but given the fact that the exchange in the White House happened only a few days before and grabbed headlines around the world, it all fits a pattern that seems to be more than coincidental.
O’Brien has taken jabs at Trump in the past and did in the ceremony when he brought up Anora, but he was also clear in the lead-up to the event that he would be performing a balancing act.
“I think as host I cannot ignore the moment we’re in right now, but also it’s threading a needle,” he said in a press conference on the Wednesday before the ceremony. “I want to do it with humour and also make sure the night doesn’t drift into only about that. It’s a difficult line to walk, but I’m determined to do it.”
There hasn’t been much information about how the skit came about. “We had an idea for Sandler,” O’Brien told the Hollywood Reporter on Monday. “Adam and I are old friends, and I called him up. He liked the idea, and then he said, ‘I have another idea.’ And it involved him dressing in the way that he’s most comfortable — which of course was his idea because he doesn’t want to put on a tux.”
This isn’t particularly revelatory one way or the other and leaves us with more questions than answers. As it stands, you’ll just have to let the video do the talking.
