John Cena showed up naked to the Oscars, and we can’t un-Cena it

A naked John Cena was not on our bingo card.

John Cena seemingly presented the award for Best Costume Design at the Oscars while naked. Yes, NAKED.

Jimmy Kimmel and John Cena surprised the entire audience at the Academy Awards with the naked body of Cena. Kimmel was reminiscing about a previous Academy Awards moment when a man streaked across the stage. He then asks the audience, “Can you imagine if a nude man ran across the stage today?” At that point, Cena was supposed to streak across the stage but was “afraid” to do the deed.

Kimmel told him to stop making it weird. That’s when John slowly inched his way out to the podium, with only an envelope covering his nether region, to present the award for Best Costume Design. He fittingly opened his award presentation dialogue with “Costumes are so important.”

How to stream the 2024 WWE Royal Rumble on Saturday

WWE’s first big event of 2024 debuts this weekend with the Royal Rumble and we can help you watch it at home on Peacock.

WrestleMania season is about to get underway with WWE’s Royal Rumble set for action this weekend.

Fans will get to see Roman Reigns defend his Undisputed WWE Universal Championship in a Fatal Four-Way match, Logan Paul put his United States Championship on the line, and of course, the men’s and women’s Royal Rumble matches for a shot to main event WrestleMania 40 later this April. If you want to see how the Road to WrestleMania gets rolling, we’ve got the scoop on how to watch the 2024 Royal Rumble.

Recommendations are independently chosen by Reviewed, USA Today’s product review site. Purchases made through the links below may earn us and our partners a commission.

WWE Raw’s $5 billion price tag at Netflix means most of the sports you love will be streaming soon

Get ready to watch Big Ten football on Crunchyroll, or whatever.

Soon you won’t be able to find the WWE’s flagship weekly program on cable television. Beginning in 2025, Raw — formerly Monday Night Raw — is headed to Netflix.

The longtime cable staple was a ratings tentpole for the USA, what used to be TNN and, briefly, Sci-Fi Networks. Now it’s headed to streaming thanks to a megadeal that will put the WWE belts alongside Bojack Horseman, Stranger Things and Bridgerton next January. All for the price of $5 billion over 10 years.

This is a story with two narratives. The first is that pro wrestling’s wide appeal is the strongest its been since WWE’s Attitude Era where “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, The Rock, Degeneration X and various versions of The Undertaker and Mick Foley battled in the squared circle. The world’s biggest promotion has been operating at a different level from both an in-ring and storytelling level, creating a product that’s worth $500 million annually for 52 three-hour programs.

The other is that streaming services aren’t ceding any growth when it comes to live sports — or, in this case, sports entertainment. Raw marks Netflix’s first major foray into both sports and live streaming. It’s far from the first platform to break into the field.

Netflix could not ignore the success of Amazon Prime’s Thursday Night Football simulcasts. Or the loud grumbling and eventual submission to Peacock’s exclusive broadcast rights of the 2024 Wild Card showdown between the Miami Dolphins and Kansas City Chiefs. And while those programs were handled very differently — Prime’s ability to mesh live advanced stats and predictive analysis added a unique layer to its coverage, while Peacock offered fans the opportunity to see plays three plays behind the box score and various buffering screens — they both served as drivers for new signups in an increasingly fractured streaming landscape.

That’s a big deal for Netflix, who’ll bid adieu to its most-watched property — Stranger Things — this year. Live sports was the one genre missing from its lineup, and while pro wrestling doesn’t have the cache of the NFL or NBA or MLB (streaming, occasionally, on Apple TV in the past and likely on Prime going forward) it’s more than a niche broadcast. It’s a part of the zeitgeist, a product that maintains a steady viewership and occasionally reaches greater heights on the shoulders of larger-than-life stars. It’s also a property that won’t be folded into Disney’s empire as the parent company of ESPN and all the over-air and streaming broadcasts that come with that.

This $5 billion deal is another cannon blast in the war for live broadcast rights. It’s terrible news for basic and premium cable channels. The only reliable driver of traditional Nielsen ratings — the metric through which advertising slots are priced and sold — is live sports.

Losing Raw is a bitter pill for the USA Network to swallow, but what happens when Prime or Max or Paramount+ or Netflix make a play for the NBA rights that will be up for bidding in 2025? Prime already has access to the regional networks that carry local MLB and NBA games following the bankruptcy of the brand behind Bally Sports Network; is the company whose goal is to be ubiquitous with selling everything you could ever want going to stop there?

The Pac-12 fell apart, in part, because a television deal with Apple TV couldn’t match the revenue more stable major conferences could offer schools via more traditional media rights deals. That’s something that is going to change significantly by the time Big Ten broadcast rights reset in 2030 or Big 12 rights do a year later. It’s possible we’re looking at a future where Wisconsin-UCLA is shown exclusively in seven minute clips on Quibi (I’m kidding, of course. Quibi died, if I remember correctly, because it couldn’t bear to part with its prosthetic golden arm).

This is great news for sports leagues and a further step into Darwinian survival for traditional networks. Major conference college sports and NFL games could be headed for a streaming service that doesn’t yet exist. Raw’s move to Netflix isn’t the start of this trend, but it’s a sign it won’t slow down.

And as long as the broadcasts are more Amazon Prime Thursday Night Football than Peacock, uh, anything, that’s good for sports fans too.

All 4 pro wrestling references Paul Walter Hauser snuck into his Emmys speech

“Do things a little bit different. Yo, Brian Walsh, get the tables.”

Paul Walter Hauser has emerged as one of the most versatile actors working today. Who else could steal lines from Jamie Taco, work security at the Reno Sheriff’s Department, learn karate at Cobra Kai and bring a truly creepy serial killer to life in the span of three years?

That latter role — as Larry Hall in Apple TV’s true crime miniseries Black Bird — earned Hauser his first Emmy award Monday night. And, since this is the same guy who showed up to All Elite Wrestling’s Dynamite with his Golden Globe in tow to feud with Jeff Jarrett (wee woo), he made sure to pepper up his minute-long speech of rhyming couplets with a handful of pro wrestling references to balance out the mushiness of his heartfelt thanks.

Here’s each one, broken down.

Terry Funk was the purest embodiment of professional wrestling

Funk died Wednesday at age 79. Pro wrestling is better because he was part of it.

For roughly five decades, if you were a wrestling fan you understood there was a reasonable chance Terry Funk was going to show up at some point. There was no set home for the legacy wrestler who spent his life between ages 21 and 74 inside (and often brawling outside) the squared circle.

In Japan he was a feared gaijin. In America’s regional promotions he was the foil to bigger names like Jerry “the King” Lawler and Ric Flair. And mid-1990s, liftoff-of-hardcore Paul Heyman’s ECW? There he was in striped tights, giving and receiving chair shots and trading on the fact this big, bruising Texan could look invincable one minute and vulnerable the next.

Hell, he even got to brawl with Patrick Swayze in Road House. Road House.

Funk, who passed away Wednesday, took every path his art allowed over the course of his 79 years. And if you take exception to me calling pro wrestling an art, here’s a clip of Funk threatening a horse that will either change your mind or ensure that you are, in fact, cold and empty inside.

Funk was 100 percent the man shown in the clip above. A fearless Texan perpetually willing to stretch his body beyond its physical limits for the sake of the show. The son of Dory Funk, a legendary wrestler in his own right, Funk began his career as a bruising brawler in a cowboy hat. In the decades that followed, he became a mat technician, a high flyer (sort of), a hardcore legend, a tuxedo-clad interviewer, chainsaw-wielding maniac and Screen Actors Guild member.

In that stretch he painted himself as one of the toughest S.O.B.s in a business filled with them. He constantly wrestled through injury in the name of a good show. He left multiple matches for medical attention only to return, taped up and ready to brawl once more. His promos bordered on, and occasionally ventured into, lunacy. Even so, you never once doubted that Funk didn’t fully believe every damn thing he was saying through gritted teeth.

Looks inside Funk’s actual life were few and far between. Barry Blaustein’s 1999 documentary Beyond the Mat suggested the veteran wrestler was more or less exactly who he portrayed in the ring. He was a 55-year-old man with knees so shot doctors couldn’t figure out how he was able to walk without howling in pain. He wrestled for more than a decade after that diagnosis, busting out a signature moonsault that looked equal parts ugly and devastating.

Funk’s appeal was widespread. He appeared on Monday Night Raw and Monday Nitro. He wrestled in All Japan Pro Wrestling and the NWA. He worked for Ring of Honor, Pro Wrestling Guerrilla and Juggalo Championship Wrestling. He retired and unretired with a regularity that Brett Favre would find excessive. The siren call of the ring lured him back, and the fans always wanted more.

No matter where he landed, he constantly popped crowds. He was a sigil for hardcore enthusiasts and casuals alike, a spectacle running head first toward an never-ending explosion all the while understanding only pain lay ahead. That he got to 79 years at all suggests there are supernatural forces at play in this world, and they like wrestling.

Rest in peace, Terry Funk. Pro wrestling is better because you were a part of it.