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Scarlett Johansson Brings 50th Season of 'SNL' to a Low-key Close

US actress Scarlett Johansson presents the film 'Jurassic World Rebirth' onstage during CinemaCon. VALERIE MACON / AFP
US actress Scarlett Johansson presents the film 'Jurassic World Rebirth' onstage during CinemaCon. VALERIE MACON / AFP
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Scarlett Johansson Brings 50th Season of 'SNL' to a Low-key Close

US actress Scarlett Johansson presents the film 'Jurassic World Rebirth' onstage during CinemaCon. VALERIE MACON / AFP
US actress Scarlett Johansson presents the film 'Jurassic World Rebirth' onstage during CinemaCon. VALERIE MACON / AFP

“Saturday Night Live” was more reflective than festive in the final episode of its 50th season.
Scarlett Johansson, who set a record for a woman with her seventh appearance as host, used her monologue to lead most of the current cast of the NBC sketch institution in a song sung to the tune of Billy Joel's “Piano Man."
The performance looked back on an eventful year that included an election, an epic anniversary special and a star-studded concert.
“Sing us a song, it’s your monologue, the 50th season is through,” Johansson sang, along with Bowen Yang, Ego Nwodim, Mikey Day, Heidi Gardner and others. “It’s lasting forever, we did it together, and we got to spend it with you."
Johansson teased, then took back, a guest appearance that would have been in keeping with the season's excess of guest stars, The Associated Press said.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Billy Joel!” she shouted, before adding, “wrote this song.”
No post-season cast departures have been announced, so no emotional farewells were necessary, but Johansson and the cast joked in the song that Sarah Sherman would be gone.
“It’s been a great season and Sarah is leaving, we’re all gonna miss you next year!" they sang. A stunned Sherman replied, “Wait, what? Did you guys hear something?”
Johansson's husband, Colin Jost, is a writer on the show and anchor of the “Weekend Update” segment.
Jost and co-anchor Michael Che returned to their annual season-finale tradition of writing and being forced to deliver wildly inappropriate jokes for each other.
Johansson is the subject of many of the Che-written jokes, so this year Jost compelled Che to bring her out and apologize for once comparing part of her body to “Costco roast beef.”
The 50th season brought much media discussion of who might run the show should 80-year-old creator Lorne Michaels ever step down.
Some have suggested Jost might replace Michaels and Che forced Jost to address the issue with one of the jokes written for him.
“It’s SNL’s 50th season, so I want to take a moment to say something to our boss,” Jost said. “Lorne, retire, bitch! let me run the show.”
Jost also appeared in a pre-recorded, behind-the-scenes bit where Johansson has torrid sex with Yang after she confesses to Nwodim and Gardner that she has a crush on him, and learns he has only been publicly pretending to be gay “for the clout.”
Johansson has her heart broken when she learns Yang also has been hooking up with Nwodim, Gardner and guest star Emily Ratajkowski.
In another behind-the-scenes digital short made by the three members of comedy group Please Don't Destroy, Johansson treats the trio to a first-class flight that becomes a luxe hip-hop video until the men panic when they learn they are landing at the troubled airport of Newark, New Jersey.
Musical guest Bad Bunny appears as an air traffic controller, working alone on his first day.
As in nearly every episode of this season, James Austin Johnson's Trump broke the fourth wall and walked into the audience at the end of the bit.
“It’s the ‘SNL’ finale, season 50 — worst one yet!” he said. “See you again in the fall if we still have a country. It’s a coin toss.”

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Movie Review: From Bumper to Bumper, ‘F1’ Is Formula One Spectacle 

Brad Pitt, from left, Lewis Hamilton, and Damson Idris attend the world premiere of "F1 The Movie" on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Times Square in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Brad Pitt, from left, Lewis Hamilton, and Damson Idris attend the world premiere of "F1 The Movie" on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Times Square in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
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Movie Review: From Bumper to Bumper, ‘F1’ Is Formula One Spectacle 

Brad Pitt, from left, Lewis Hamilton, and Damson Idris attend the world premiere of "F1 The Movie" on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Times Square in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Brad Pitt, from left, Lewis Hamilton, and Damson Idris attend the world premiere of "F1 The Movie" on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Times Square in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

The wide-screen spectacle of Formula One gets a gleaming, rip-roaring workout in Joseph Kosinski’s “F1,” a fine-tuned machine of a movie that, in its most riveting racing scenes, approaches a kind of high-speed splendor.

Kosinski, who last endeavored to put moviegoers in the seat of a fighter jet in “Top Gun: Maverick,” has moved to the open cockpits of Formula One with much the same affection, if not outright need, for speed. A lot of the same team is back. Jerry Bruckheimer produces. Ehren Kruger, a co-writer on “Maverick,” takes sole credit here. Hans Zimmer, a co-composer previously, supplies the thumping score.

And, again, our central figure is an older, high-flying cowboy plucked down in an ultramodern, gas-guzzling conveyance to teach a younger generation about old-school ingenuity and, maybe, the enduring appeal of denim.

But whereas Tom Cruise is a particularly forward-moving action star, Brad Pitt, who stars as the driving-addicted Sonny Hayes in “F1,” has always been a more arrestingly poised presence. Think of the way he so calmly and half-interestedly faces off with Bruce Lee in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood.” In the opening scene of “F1,” he’s sleeping in a van with headphones on when someone rouses him. He splashes some water on his face and walks a few steps over to the Daytona oval, where he quickly enters his team’s car, in the midst of a 24-hour race. Pitt goes from zero to 180 mph in a minute.

Sonny, a long-ago phenom who crashed out of Formula One decades earlier and has since been racing any vehicle, even a taxi, he can get behind the wheel of, is approached by an old friend, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) about joining his flagging F1 team, APX. Sonny turns him down at first but, of course, he joins and “F1” is off to the races.

The title sequence, exquisitely timed to the syncopated rhythms of Zimmer’s score, is a blistering introduction. The hotshot rookie driver Noah Pearce (Damson Idris) is just running a practice lap, but Kosinski, his camera adeptly moving in and out of the cockpit, uses the moment to plunge us into the high-tech world of Formula One, where every inch of the car is connected to digital sensors monitored by a watchful team. Here, that includes technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon) and Kaspar Molinski (Kim Bodnia), the team’s chief.

Verisimilitude is of obvious importance to the filmmakers, who bathe this very Formula One-authorized film in all the sleek operations and globe-trotting spectacle of the sport. That Apple, which produced the film, would even go for such a high-priced summer movie about Formula One is a testament to the upswing in popularity of a sport once quite niche in America, and of the halo effects of both the Netflix series “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” and the seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton, an executive producer on “F1.”

Whether “F1” pleases diehards, I’ll leave to more ardent followers of the circuit. But what I can say definitively is that Claudio Miranda knows how to shoot it. The cinematographer, who has shot all of Kosinski’s films as well as wonders like Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi,” brings Formula One to vivid, visceral life. When “F1” heads to the big races, Miranda is always simultaneously capturing the zooming cars from the asphalt while backgrounding it with the sweeping spectacle of a course like the UK’s fabled Silverstone Circuit.

OK, you might be thinking, so the racing is good; is there a story? There’s what I’d call enough of one, though you might have to go to the photo finish to verify that. When Sonny shows up, and rapidly turns one practice vehicle into toast, it’s clear that he’s going to be an agent of chaos at APX, a low-ranking team that’s in heavy debt and struggling to find a car that performs.

This gives Pitt a fine opportunity to flash his charisma, playing Sonny as an obsessive who refuses any trophy and has no real interest in money, either. The flashier, media-ready Noah watches Sonny's arrival with skepticism, and the two begin more as rivals than teammates. Idris is up to the mano-a-mano challenge, but he’s limited by a role ultimately revolving around and reducing to a young Black man learning a lesson in work ethic.

A relationship does develop, but “F1” struggles to get its characters out of the starting blocks, keeping them closer to the cliches they start out as. The actor who, more than anyone, keeps the momentum going is Condon, playing an aerodynamics specialist whose connection with Pitt’s Sonny is immediate. Just as she did in between another pair of headstrong men in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Condon is a rush of naturalism.

If there’s something preventing “F1” from hitting full speed, it’s its insistence on having its characters constantly voice Sonny’s motivations. The same holds true on the race course, where broadcast commentary narrates virtually every moment of the drama. That may be a necessity for a sport where the crucial strategies of hot tires and pit-stop timing aren't quite household concepts. But the best car race movies — from “Grand Prix” to “Senna” to “Ferrari” — know when to rely on nothing but the roar of an engine.

“F1” steers predictably to the finish line, cribbing here and there from sports dramas before it. (Tobias Menzies plays a board member with uncertain corporate goals.) When “F1” does, finally, quiet down, for one blissful moment, the movie, almost literally, soars. It's not quite enough to forget all the high-octane macho dramatics before it, but it's enough to glimpse another road “F1” might have taken.