(L-R) Teyana Taylor as Perfidia and Sean Penn as Col. Steven J. Lockjaw in ‘One Battle After Another. A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. (Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures)
Sean Penn won best supporting actor at the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday night for his role as Steven J. Lockjaw in One Battle After Another.
This was Penn’s sixth Oscar nomination and his third win. He was nominated alongside Benicio Del Toro, Jacob Elordi, Delroy Lindo and Stellan Skarsgård.
Last year’s winner, Kieran Culkin, took to the stage to announce this year’s best supporting actor nominees. Culkin won the award in 2025 for his performance in A Real Pain. Penn did not attend the ceremony, so Culkin accepted the award for him.
“Sean Penn couldn’t be here, or didn’t want to, so I accept this award on his behalf,” Culkin said.
Penn was previously nominated for his roles in Dead Man Walking, Sweet and Lowdown and I Am Sam. He won his first Oscar for Mystic River in 2004, before winning again in 2009 for Milk.
Sophie Skelton as Brianna MacKenzie, Richard Rankin as Roger MacKenzie, Caitriona Balfe as Claire Fraser and Sam Heughan as Jamie Fraser in ‘Outlander.’ (Starz)
The time has come to say goodbye to the time travel romance Outlander. The series’ eighth and final season premieres on Starz Friday.
It promises to be an emotional conclusion to the Fraser family’s story, which began with Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Claire’s (Caitriona Balfe) years-spanning love story and expanded to include their daughter, Brianna (Sophie Skelton), and her husband, Roger (Richard Rankin).
The first couple of episodes are a family reunion of sorts with the characters coming back together after some time apart. Skelton says “every scene had a bittersweet feeling” as members of the show’s large cast began to wrap.
“It was almost like death by a thousand cuts really,” Rankin adds. “You had one person wrap one day, then the next day, and then the next day. And people did get quite emotional.”
Multiple endings for the series were shot, and while Rankin says he knows which one was chosen, Skelton says she’s still in the dark.
“I actually, I’m kind of intrigued to see it with the fans,” she says. “I actually haven’t even asked, so I don’t know. Yeah, I’m in it with you guys.”
While the end is near, Skelton and Rankin both say if they could time travel to relive any moment on set, they’d go back to the beginning.
“Maybe my first day, I feel,” Skelton, who joined the show in season 2, says. “It might be cool to go back and just, I don’t know, relive what I was thinking. … It’d be fun to go back now with the knowledge I’ve got and just be like, ‘Mate, just go for it. Do something rogue with Brianna.’”
Rankin agrees, adding that he was “perhaps a little shy” when he first started and would go back to “just maybe have a little word with myself and, you know, maybe be a bit bolder.”
Anthony Geary and Genie Francis attend The Paley Center for Media Presents “General Hospital: Celebrating 50 years and Looking Forward” at The Paley Center for Media on April 12, 2013 in Beverly Hills, California. (Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)
General Hospital actress Genie Francis is remembering her late co-star Anthony Geary, who died Sunday at the age of 78. Francis and Geary famously starred as Laura and Luke Spencer in the long-running soap opera for 37 years.
“Tony was a very warm person, very sensitive person, and incredibly funny,” Francis told ABC News. “I was very, very young and Tony was very protective of me. But we knew we were doing something very edgy.”
“[Television producer] Gloria Monty always said that we were going to change the face of daytime,” Francis continued. “And we were doing that. We were so excited. We didn’t want to leave when we were released. We’d sometimes sit on the stage and just talk about what we had done.”
Francis and Geary’s portrayal of the iconic couple earned both Daytime Emmy Awards and in 1981, when their characters married, about 30 million Americans tuned in to watch the wedding on General Hospital.
Geary opened up about his and Francis’ chemistry and success together in an interview with Good Morning America back in 2013.
“There are all kinds of successes but ours was different in that it was truly lightning in a bottle,” Geary said at the time. “It was the most unexpected place, a soap opera, which was about to be canceled, that took everyone’s interest and swept the nation. It’s a piece of history that I’m glad I took part in.”
Francis, now 63, said she will miss her longtime partner.
“I’m just heartbroken. I’m so sad,” said Francis. “But again, I am so lucky that I got to have this man as my first leading man. He ruined me. He ruined me for leading men for the rest of my life basically. Because I started with the best.”
Natalia Dyer as Nancy Wheeler, Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas Sinclair and Finn Wolfhard as Mike Wheeler in ‘Stranger Things’ season 5. (Netflix)
Stranger Things season 5 has turned Netflix’s records upside down.
During the first five days of streaming, the fifth and final season of the popular sci-fi series accumulated 59.6 million views.
That makes it the best-ever premiere week viewing numbers for an English-language series on the streaming platform and the third-best overall. The only thing ahead of Stranger Things season 5 are seasons 2 and 3 of Squid Game.
Co-creators Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer shared their reaction to the large audience that tuned in to watch season 5 during its debut week.
“The sheer number of fans who have already watched volume 1 is staggering — the response has been more than we ever could have dreamed,” The Duffers said. “The show is now a decade old, and seeing the fanbase not only endure but continue to grow has been incredibly rewarding for us, the actors, and the thousands of artists who helped bring this story to life. We truly cannot thank everyone enough, and we are beyond excited to share volume 2 — there’s so much more to come!”
Additionally, all five seasons of Stranger Things made the top 10 of the English TV list, with season 1 at #3, season 4 at #5, season 2 at #6 and season 3 at #8. This means the first four seasons of the show have now garnered an accumulated 1.2 billion views since their respective premieres.
Netflix released the first batch of season 5 episodes on Nov. 26. Those four episodes make up what is billed as volume 1. The second volume, consisting of three episodes, will debut on the platform on Dec. 25. The series finale of Stranger Things premieres on Dec. 31 and will also arrive in select theaters.
