One of the most buzzed-about moments during Sunday's Oscars was when stars of classics like The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Buellers' Day Off reunited onstage to pay tribute to their mentor and director John Hughes, who passed away at age 59 last summer.
80s-era teen stars were joined by the younger Macauley Culkin, who shot to fame in 1990 at the age of ten as the star of Hughes' blockbuster caper Home Alone.
"They approached me about a month ago," Culkin, now 29, told UsMagazine.com inside the Kodak Theater Sunday night during a commercial break.
The actor explained that the nature of the tribute was up in the air until the last minute. "I wasn't sure what we were going to do until I got here. As long as the family loved it, that’s all that is important to me." Hughes' surviving wife and children were in the audience as Ringwald, Broderick, Culkin, Jon Cryer, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson and Anthony Michael Hall looked back on working with Hughes.
Many watching the touching segment found themselves distracted by the physical appearance of Judd Nelson. Now 50, the actor (famous as "Bender" in The Breakfast Club) looked gaunt, sporting tinted spectacles and patchy facial hair.
"Hi, this is Judd Nelson, I need a cab — I'm at the Kodak Theater, heading back to the Homeless Shelter," joked Twitterer sportsguy33; thousands of similarly snarky comments flooded the microblogging site immediately following Nelson's emergence.
