Props and candid moments from the Oscar's red carpet
Oscars glam got off to a strong start on Sunday with both subtle and bold displays of glam as fans anticipated the arrivals of Hollywood's biggest stars. Julianne Hough kicked things off in an elegant light beige ethereal look straight off the Christian Dior spring 2025 runway.
Joan Chen also went fairy-like in green chartreuse, an off-shoulder number from the Elie Saab resort 2025 collection. The colour red — big, bright red — endured at the Oscars as a strong trend. Among early walkers wearing the hue: Storm Reid in a shortie with a long cape and Emily Kassie.
Others stuck to black, including Marlee Matlin in Yara Shoemaker Couture and Coco Jones in sexy Coach, a custom combo of vintage and new.
Mikey Madison, Demi Moore, Timothée Chalamet, Danielle Deadwyler, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo were among A-listers with red carpet wow momentum heading into the Oscars. The 97th Oscars come less than two months after the devastating Los Angeles fires subdued carpet dressing for a time.
As the city moves into rebuild mode, stars have been upping their fashion games heading into the biggest awards night of the season. Some were notable for playing it glam but safe. Like Margot Robbie's Barbie pink, Grande has been mostly sticking to a far paler hue, her signature and an homage to her 'Wicked' good witch, Glinda.
Castmate and carpet bestie Erivo has always taken fashion risks. She ditched her Elphaba black for last week's Screen Actors Guild awards, opting for a silver Givenchy look with a high shaggy collar worthy of her bad witch role. Chalamet has been all over the place on carpet dressing as he navigates his Bob Dylan attention from 'A Complete Unknown.'
At the SAGs, he married a bright brat green button-up shirt from Chrome Hearts with a shiny black leather suit and a bolo tie as he continues to channel the real-life icon he plays. Deadwyler is a risk-taker, too. She wore a bright red strapless 3D structured tiered gown from Louis Vuitton at the SAGs.
Jeremy Strong wore a mint green velvet Loro Piana suit with a bucket hat in the same colour to the Golden Globes. His white turtleneck topped it all off. He was nominated for supporting actor at the Oscars. At the SAGs, Strong wore a different shade of green. It was a dusty green for a custom Haans Nicholas Mott suit with satin shawl lapels.
He wore it with a bowtie. Madison, a new fashion darling, was among several stars to go vintage at the recent dinner for Oscar nominees. The star of 'Anora' wore a dark blue velvet gown by Bill Blass from 1987. She collected a BAFTA award earlier this month in a custom Prada in ivory, accessorizing with a long matching stole and a vintage Tiffany & Co. diamond necklace.
She also went Hollywood bombshell at the SAGs with a strapless silver Louis Vuitton look with a large pleated bow at the waist. She's been working with stylist Jamie Mizrahi, who has dressed Adele and Jennifer Lawrence, among many other celebs.
'Wicked' star Ariana Grande walked the Oscars red carpet on Sunday in a sculptural flared pink top and a tulle skirt by Schiaparelli, one of several actors to make bold fashion statements. Ana de Armas, Lily-Rose Depp, Rachel Zegler, and Annabelle Wallis graced the red carpet.
Whoopi Goldberg wore a shiny blue gown with a flared skirt, while British actress Yasmin Finney sported a black dress featuring feathery attachments that shot over her head.
'A Complete Unknown' star Elle Fanning chose a lacy white gown with a full skirt and black belt, while 'The Brutalist' best supporting actress nominee Felicity Jones wore a silver dress with slits and a tie around the waist. Demi Moore, favoured to win best actress for 'The Substance,' won a sparkling silver gown with a train flowing behind her.
Comedian Bowen Yang wore a pink shirt and an embroidered leather jacket with no tie. The creators behind the animated film 'Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl' carried props related to their film, and one of the directors of the documentary feature about Ukraine, 'Porcelain War,' carried a small dog in his arms.
Hollywood star Penelope Cruz set her best fashion foot forward and was a sight to behold as she looked elegant as always at the 2025 Oscars red carpet.
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Khaleej Times
2 days ago
- Khaleej Times
‘Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning' director unpacks key moments
Christopher McQuarrie was a 27-year-old former movie-theater security guard when he won the Oscar for best screenplay in 1996 for 'The Usual Suspects.' Things went a little pear-shaped from that early peak, as they tend to do in Hollywood, and the Princeton, New Jersey, native was looking to leave the industry altogether when he piqued Tom Cruise's interest for another script that became the 2008 Adolf Hitler-assassination drama 'Valkyrie.' It was the start of a professional relationship that has culminated in McQuarrie, now 56, directing and coproducing the past four films of the 'Mission Impossible' franchise, including 'Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,' in which Cruise famously stars as the unsinkable (and seemingly unkillable) special agent Ethan Hunt. Recently, McQuarrie spoke with The New York Times in New York and later via video call from the back of an SUV in Mexico City about the choice to make artificial intelligence the villain, the question of whether the franchise is coming to an end, and a 'gnarly' secret Tom Cruise movie in the works. Here are edited excerpts from those conversations: When did the decision come that 'Dead Reckoning' and 'Final Reckoning' would be the final two films in the franchise? Over the course of 'Rogue Nation' [2015], 'Fallout' [2018] and then 'Dead Reckoning' [2023], we were delving deeper and deeper into the emotions of the characters and their arcs. I said, 'Look, we know that it's going to be a long movie, let's just cut it in half.' I understand the irony of me saying we were going to make two two-hour movies and we ended up making these two much, much bigger ones. But we didn't really think of it as being the conclusion of anything until we were about halfway through 'Dead Reckoning.' Over time, we started to feel that this is a movie about the franchise more than just about the mission. During production, you also had to contend with a pandemic and two Hollywood strikes. How did that affect you? We paused and caught our breath. We edited and reevaluated. The writers strike meant that I couldn't write, but I could edit. The actors strike meant that Tom could not act or produce. Nobody was going to separate Tom the actor from Tom the producer, so he couldn't scout [locations]. It created a completely different approach to the movies. You can't control [events] any more than you can control the weather, so you just lean into it. We've had sets destroyed, we've had actors in the hospital. Every lead actress we've ever worked with has been pregnant at one point or another. There are always those things coming at you. Why the title change from 'Dead Reckoning' to 'Final Reckoning'? Very simply, once 'Dead Reckoning' performed the way that it did, and the time between the two movies was getting longer and longer, we knew we were getting further and further away from 'Part One.' Why present a movie to which people would hear the title and say, 'Well, I didn't see 'Part One,' so I'm not going to see 'Part Two''? We were always making 'Part Two,' as it was then called, to be a stand-alone movie, the same way 'Top Gun: Maverick' is engineered to be a stand-alone movie. [McQuarrie was a writer and producer on that movie.] We don't expect you to have seen 'Top Gun,' and even if you have, we're not going to ask you to remember it. The stunts in these movies are famously risky and elaborate. But you don't hear much about injuries on set, aside from Tom breaking his ankle on 'Fallout.' The biggest stress on a movie is time. That's where all the anxiety comes from for me. And I simply had to let go of the deadline and the calendar, and everything that you're programmed as a director to base your entire life on. It has changed the way I direct. I now look at the camera crew as a holistic organism and how stress and anxiety lead to mistakes, some of them life and death, and some of them just hugely costly and financial. That doesn't mean I still didn't get stressed or angry. But no deadline is worth somebody's life, so it's very clarifying when you're making movies like this. Tom and I also have a very simple rule: Only one of us can be crazy at a time. Whoever is the person that's really angry and frustrated, the other person just immediately becomes chill. And that is an agreement between us, but it's also an automatic response. It's another big reason we work so well together. There's a major character death in the first act of 'Final Reckoning,' which we won't spoil here. Do actors ever volunteer for that? Yes. 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It was [producer] Jerry Bruckheimer, [the original's director] Tony Scott and Tom, and I didn't know why I was there. I was the only guy who didn't work on the first one. And the only thing I could bring to it is that I remembered being a 17-year-old kid watching that movie. I could bring the audience's perspective. So I said, 'Maverick was America. And whatever America is, that's what Maverick needs to be in order for us to make this movie.' People brought the Cold War to the first 'Top Gun.' The filmmakers didn't have to establish that, it was there. And so what is this generation's version of that? What is the Cold War presence in the zeitgeist? Now, we had talked about information technology going all the way back to 'Rogue Nation.' I had talked about it in 1999 with Oliver Stone when he was at one point flirting with directing 'Mission: Impossible.' This is years before I met Tom. The problem was that information technology was always something intellectual where you had to explain the mechanics of the threat. It wasn't emotional. Come 2019, we had finished 'Fallout." We were making 'Top Gun: Maverick,' and I said to Tom, 'The audience is ready for technology to be the villain, not just the threat.' The opening of 'Final Reckoning' features a sort of greatest-hits montage from the series. What was the calculus in bringing those past clips in and balancing it with the current story? You want it to feel fluid. There's always the struggle, the balance of how much exposition is too much and how much is not enough. And I think we found a nice balance. But look, I would love to make the movie with no dialogue at all. If you go back and watch 'Rogue Nation,' 'Fallout' and 'Dead Reckoning,' you can watch them with just the score. And you can watch it as a silent movie when you watch the mission brief in 'Fallout': 'Good evening, Mr. Hunt.' It's so much more compelling without dialogue. There have been criticisms about the amount of exposition in 'Final Reckoning.' Does that faze you? Everything we do, we're doing for the audience — all the information that we're shooting, all the exposition, all the flashbacks, everything is there to absolve them of the burden of having to concentrate on the movie. We don't want it to be work. We want it to be an experience. Then there are people who don't care how much time and effort and work you put into it. They're just going, 'I don't need that.' That's the push and pull of these movies. We always want them to start faster. We always want them to be shorter. We always want less dialogue, because they're global movies and billions of people all over the world are reading this movie rather than just listening to it. You have said that you're working on something with Tom and your 'Final Reckoning' co-writer that is 'gnarlier' than "Mission.' What can you say about that? It's gnarly! Tom has fewer than 500 words in the entire movie. His co-star has fewer words than that. I think between the two of them, they have about 750 words. It stems from my having worked on these movies so much and learned so much about the power of composition and behavior over dialogue, and that dialogue is a symptom. It's a consequence of plot. 'Mission' [movies] are so plotty because you're trying to stitch together many ambitious sequences in one movie. You have to create the reasons that make them emotional. That's where all the plot comes from, which is where all the exposition comes from. And the 'gnarly' movie has without a doubt, probably the simplest plot. It's the most straightforward human story I've worked on, and it's the kind of movie I've always wanted to make. If you don't surrender to 'Mission,' it will crush you. You just put your ego in check and push yourself technically as far as you can go. The impression is that it's Tom's movie, and Tom is totally in control. The reality is the movie is in control. The audience is in control. There's no getting around the dialogue that people were wincing at. You need to communicate it simply, to a global audience. Don't be a snob. Just say it upfront, get it done with and done right. The 'gnarly' movie is not burdened by that plot or those sequences. It's still a deeply human story and it's still very, very emotional, but they're in a much more intimate and brutal world than a 'Mission Impossible' world. The 'John Wick' movies are moving away from Keanu Reeves as the main character after four films, but is continuing the franchise with Ana de Armas in 'From the World of John Wick: Ballerina.' Do you see that kind of continuation for this series? Well, I mean, what is 'Mission'? It's a very specific thing with a very specific kind of filmmaking, involving an actor who performs all that action himself. If you were to spin characters off, it'd be another kind of story altogether. I'd be curious to see how that worked. One of the things I love about them is that they are a team. They're all great characters, but if you spin them off, you would lose two things entirely: One, you'd lose what Ethan Hunt brings to the franchise in terms of its scale and its action, and you'd also lose the team. It would cease to be the 'Mission' we know. That's not to say somebody couldn't invent a new 'Mission Impossible.' Having worked on a few of them, I can say, 'Good luck.'
Campaign ME
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Harpers Bazaar Arabia
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- Harpers Bazaar Arabia
Meet The New Look Milanese Home Of Louis Vuitton
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