RED CARPET: “Oppenheimer,” the movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the atomic bomb, won Best Picture, Best Actor, and five other Oscars at the Academy Awards last night.

  “Barbie,” the highest grossing movie of 2023, scored only a single Oscar when Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell took the Best Song statue for “What Was I Made For?” Only 22, Eilish is the youngest person ever to win two Oscars, having won also for Best Song in 2022 with “No Time to Die.”  The Winners:

• -Best Picture, “Oppenheimer”
• -Best Actor, Cillian Murphy, “Oppenheimer.”
• -Best Actress: Emma “Stone, “Poor Things
• -Best Supporting Actress, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, “The Holdovers”
• -Best Supporting Actor, Robert Downey Jr., “Oppenheimer”
• -Best Director, Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer”

  Late in the show, Host Jimmy Kimmel shared a social media post from former president Donald Trump, reading to the audience, “Has there ever been a worse host than Jimmy Kimmel at the Oscars?” 

  Reading on, Kimmel quoted Trump saying, “Get rid of Kimmel and perhaps replace him with another washed up, but cheap, ABC ‘talent,’ George Slopanopoulos,” a reference to ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos.

  Kimmel expressed surprise that Trump was still up watching and asked, “Isn’t it past your jail time?”

THE DIPLOMATIC FRONT: President Biden over the weekend stiffened his call for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be more cautious about killing civilians in Gaza without bluntly condemning the more than 30,000 deaths that have occurred so far in Israel’s destruction of the densely populated strip.

  “He has a right to defend Israel, a right to continue to pursue Hamas, but he must, he must, he must pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken,” Biden said about Netanyahu in an interview with MSNBC. The President said Netanyahu is “hurting Israel more than helping Israel.”

  Netanyahu responded in an interview released by Politico last night, 

saying, “I don’t know exactly what the president meant, but if he meant by that that I’m pursuing private policies against the majority, the wish of the majority of Israelis, and that this is hurting the interests of Israel, then he’s wrong on both counts.” 

  Likely what Biden meant is that the continuing slaughter is hurting Israel in world opinion. The President hedged saying “the defense of Israel is still critical” but “He (Netanyahu) cannot have 30,000 more Palestinians dead as a consequence.” 

THE WAR ZONE: A US military ship set sail from Virginia over the weekend, headed to Gaza with equipment to build a temporary pier for the offloading of humanitarian aid to the starving residents. The US and Jordan have been air dropping supplies by parachute, but that doesn’t provide nearly enough, and several people were killed on the ground when a parachute malfunctioned.

  It will take roughly 1,000 soldiers 60 days to build the pier, which means Americans in uniform will be in the war zone presenting a tempting target for Hamas while aid continues to dribble in on convoys of trucks.

  The UN has warned that serious famine is developing in the Gaza Strip and people, particularly children, are dying. The photograph of a pale and skeletal 10-year-old boy lying on a hospital gurney has become the poster-image for the crisis. Yazan Kafarneh died the day after his picture was taken.

PHOTOSHOP: Royal watchers became excited when Kensington Palace released a photo of a smiling Princess Kate posing with her three children after having abdominal surgery and not being seen in public since Christmas. The photo was credited to Kate’s husband William, the Prince of Wales.

  Then the Associated Press and other news agencies took a closer look at the picture, which bore several signs of having been digitally manipulated, and withdrew it from circulation. Some of the children’s hands look odd and there’s a red blotch that appears to have travelled from Princess Charlotte’s sweater to her skirt.

  Princess Kate issued an apology this morning saying she was the one who altered the photo.

THE SPIN RACK: A man who shoved his girlfriend into the path of a New York subway train, forcing the amputation of both of the woman’s feet, has been charged with felony assault. The two were seen arguing. The accused, Christian Valdez, 35, has previously done time for assault. — The NBA fined Minnesota Timberwolves center Rudy Gobert $100,000 for flashing a hand signal at a referee indicating “money” and suggesting that the league refs are influenced by sports betting. 

BELOW THE FOLD: The dust appears to have settled on the public speaking career of Alabama Sen. Katie Britt, who met approbation from both sides of the ideological aisle for her delivery of the Republican response last week to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.

  Sitting at her kitchen table in Alabama, Britt alternated between insincere smiles and manufactured anger. Blaming President Biden for the immigration crisis, she told the tale of a women who had been sex trafficked … in Mexico and 12 years before Biden became president. Appearing as Britt on Saturday Night Live, Scarlett Johansson said, “Tonight, I’m auditioning for the part of ‘scary mom.’”

  Daily Beast columnist Matt Lewis wrote, “If you were having a conversation with someone who was careening from joy to sadness to anger like this, your instinct would be: ‘I need to get the hell out of here. I’m going to slowly back out of this room’.”

  Conservative host Megyn Kelly said on her podcast: “I agree with the people saying she looked like she was auditioning for a show on Lifetime. The drama, the fake affectation, the over the top portrayal of emotions I did not believe she was feeling at all, her inauthenticity, it was totally ‘cringe’ as the kids would say.”

  The ScarJo version of Britt said, “You see, I’m not just a senator, I’m a wife, a mother, and the craziest bitch in the Target parking lot.”

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