There were plenty of surprises in store for viewers of the 2025 Oscars on Sunday night, from Anora’s sweep to Timothée Chalamet’s butter yellow leather Givenchy suit to Halle Berry re-creating her infamous kiss with Adrien Brody on the red carpet.
One of the most welcome, however, came courtesy of Mr. Adam Sandler. During his opening monologue, Oscars host Conan O’Brien set up a bit that involved the legendary comic attending the year’s fanciest and most decadent Hollywood event in classic schmuck style—specifically, basketball shorts, sneakers, and a bright blue sweatshirt that I have to assume he borrowed from one of his daughters.
After O’Brien accuses Sandler of being dressed like “a guy playing video poker at 2 a.m.” (fair and also…kind of hot? I may have problems), Sandler responds: “Did my snazzy gym shorts and fluffy sweatshirt offend you so much that you had to mock me in front my peers?”
It wasn’t Sandler’s first time popping up during an awards show this year either. He was also roped into Nikki Glaser’s monologue at the Golden Globes in January, when she joked that Chalamet’s name “sounds like something Adam Sandler would say” before getting Sandler himself involved. (A nominee that night, he was dressed, for the record, in a perfectly respectable dark jacket.)
I would probably find almost anything Sandler had to say at least a little bit funny (I still regularly think of him screaming the following line at his real-life daughter in the 2023 film You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah: “That’s why we fought the Nazis? So you could have a mojito bar?”), but isn’t it just fun to see Adam Sandler—the Adam Sandler!—showing up in all his bumbling, weird-voiced, casually attired glory to stuffy awards shows? There’s really no one like the Sandman to help win a room over (and given how hard O’Brien and Glaser crushed as the hosts of their respective shows, maybe he’s also a good luck charm?)—even if he is in what one might generously term athleisure.
