Riz Ahmed Fixing His Wife's Hair On The Oscars Red Carpet Was The Best

Academy Award nominee and known hot person Riz Ahmed had everyone swooning at the Oscars when he took a moment to fix his wife’s hair on the red carpet.

It definitely wasn’t a normal night at the Oscars: the event was drastically ramped down due to the pandemic, and it was very clear that even famous people are going to have trouble re-entering society after a year alone in PJs. But the night still had its really lovely moments—and perhaps the best one was when Sound of Metal‘s Riz Ahmed took just a tiny moment on the red carpet to fix his wife Fatima Farheen Mirza’s hair.

“I’m the official groomer,” he said, after asking the photographers to pause for a bit to get his partner completely camera-ready. It was, after all, their first official appearance in public as a married couple.

The newlywed power couple already looked literally picture perfect, but sometimes it’s the thought that counts.

A big year for Riz Ahmed: Marriage and ‘Metal’

It’s been a heck of a good year for Riz Ahmed, a British-Pakastani actor and rapper who played a drummer losing his hearing Sound of Metal following breakout roles in Nightcrawler (2014) and The Night Of (2016). His nomination for Best Actor this year also made history, as he was the first Muslim and the first Pakastani actor to be nominated in the award’s 93-year history.

His wife Fatima Farheen Mirza is also career goals—she’s a best-selling novelist who published A Place for Us in 2018, a novel about an Indian-Muslim family living in Northern California. The couple met just as Ahmed was preparing for his role in Sound of Metal—when they bumped into each other writing in a coffee shop.

Perhaps the cutest marriage proposal

Most upsetting of all of this is probably that this isn’t even the cutest thing Ahmed has done for Mirza (that we know about). He opened up about his proposal on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and it is the best.

“We went out to the park, one of the few things we could do at that point in lockdown, and we kind of had a little picnic and you know, I popped the question,” Ahmed explained. “And she looked up and was like, ‘You’re joking.'”

And it wasn’t just at a romantic picnic. They were playing Scrabble and he spelled out the big question in tiles.

“She loves a bit of Scrabble. So we were actually playing Scrabble and I did that corny thing where I stole all the correct letters up and spelled out ‘Will you marry me?'” Ahmed explained.

Celebrating with a small COVID wedding

Like basically everyone else who tied the knot during the pandemic, the couple had a small, distanced backyard wedding with just the closest friends and family.

“It was kind of interesting doing it with COVID and everything going on, obviously kept it super intimate and socially distant,” he told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show.

He tried to look on the bright side, saying that it was kind of nice to not have “500 aunties around you pinching your cheeks.”

He continued: “No disrespect to the aunties, but Asian weddings are big. You always got these people crawling out of the woodworks who I think are probably imposters. They just smell the kebabs on the street and just wander in.”

This is the first big event the couple has been to together—and it’s a great start. Even though Riz Ahmed lost the Best Actor award to Anthony Hopkins (in one of the weirder moments of the night—Hopkins wasn’t even there), he’s pretty generally winning.