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At the 97th Academy Awards on Sunday night, the biggest winner was Sean Baker’s “Anora,” the indie flick that scooped five trophies including Best Picture. However, the longest winner turned out to be Adrien Brody.

After claiming his second Best Actor gong for his role in “The Brutalist” (he first won in 2003 for “The Pianist”), Brody gave a speech that, per Cosmopolitan, clocked in at more than five minutes, or 558 words in total.

While post-ceremony chatter might now be more focused on a certain piece of chewing gum, the win not only marks Brody joining a select group of 10 peers who have won Best Actor twice or more, but also as having one of the longest Oscar acceptance speeches in history to his name. Beating out Matthew McConaughey’s 549-word speech (2014) and Halle Berry’s 528-word thank-you (2002), the only person who might have spoken for longer than Brody was Greer Garson in 1942, whose speech could have lasted up to seven minutes, though limited footage of the ceremony means reports vary.

The shortest Oscars speech ever? Shared by Patty Duke and Alfred Hitchcock, among a handful of others, is just a simple, two-word, “Thank you.”

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OpenAI set to air a minute-long Super Bowl ad for a second consecutive year, per WSJ

OpenAI is expected to broadcast a lengthy commercial at Super Bowl LX, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Having aired its first-ever paid ad at last year’s Big Game, the ChatGPT maker is set to take another 60-second ad slot during NBC’s broadcast on February 8, according to people familiar with the matter.

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Tamagotchis are making a comeback, 3 decades after first becoming a global toy craze

If you were a ’90s kid, you might remember the craze around little egg-shaped toys with an 8-bit digital screen, displaying an ambiguous pet-thing that demanded food and attention.

Now, on the brand’s 30th anniversary, the Tamagotchi the Japanese pocket-sized virtual pet that launched a thousand cute and needy tech companions, from Nintendogs to fluffy AI robots — is making a minor comeback.

Tamagotchi Google Search Trends
Sherwood News

Looking at Google Trends data, searches for “tamagotchi” spiked in December in the US, up around 80% from just six months prior, with the most search volume in almost two decades.

While the toys are popular Christmas gifts, with interest volumes often seen ticking up in December each year, the sudden interest might also have something to do with the birthday celebrations that creator and manufacturer Bandai Namco are putting on, including a Tokyo exhibition that opened on Wednesday.

Game, set, hatch

More broadly, modern consumers appear to have a growing obsession with collectibles (see: Labubu mania), as well as a taste for nostalgia (see: the iPod revival, among many other trends).

But, having finally hit 100 million sales in September last year, the brand itself is probably just glad to exist, giving a whole new generation the chance to experience the profound grief of an unexpected Tamagotchi death.

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