It's winter, it's cold, you might be staying in a little more and that's FINE. While you're hibernating, you can get up to date with the important entertainment news you may have missed over the weekend.
- "Bad boy of entertainment" P. Diddy hands back city key to NYC mayor
- Vogel's Award announces its final winner
- Taylor pulls a swift one, blocks Charli xcx from chart top
- Italian filmmaker takes out Sydney Film Festival's biggest prize
- R.E.M. reunite for first time in almost 16 years for Hall of Fame induction
Sean "Diddy" Combs hands back key to New York City
In a ceremony in Times Square on September 15, 2023, music mogul and founder of Bad Boy Records Sean "Diddy" Combs was honoured with the key to New York City.
"The bad boy of entertainment is getting the key to the city from the bad boy of politics," Mayor Eric Adams said at the time.
Combs has now handed that key back.
The mayor requested the key be returned, after the rapper and music executive was caught on camera attacking R&B singer and his partner at the time, Casandra Ventura, known professionally as Cassie.
Mayor Adams said he was "deeply disturbed" by the footage of Combs attacking Cassie in a hotel hallway in Los Angeles in 2016, first broadcast on CNN in May.
"I strongly condemn these actions and stand in solidarity with all survivors of domestic and gender-based violence," he said.
While symbolic, the granting of the keys to the city is the highest honour a city can give an individual or an organisation, with the tradition dating back to medieval times.
Keys to Australian capital cities have been handed out to prominent people including the Matildas, the Bee Gees (Brisbane); Jørn Utzon, Nelson Mandela (Sydney); and Dolly Parton, Cathy Freeman, New Kids on the Block, Muhammad Ali (Melbourne). Singer Cher sparked outrage when her key to the city of Adelaide appeared on eBay in 2012.
Earlier this month, Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington DC, rescinded an honorary degree awarded to Combs, while ending a scholarship program in his name.
A lawsuit filed by Cassie against Combs has now been settled and, in a social media post, Combs said he was "truly sorry" for the attack.
The rapper is still facing numerous accusations of sexual abuse. His Miami and Los Angeles mansions were raided in March as part of an ongoing federal sex-trafficking investigation.
— Mawunyo Gbogbo
The final-ever $20,000 Vogel's Award
Kristina Ross has become the final-ever winner of The Australian/Vogel's Award for an unpublished manuscript by a writer under 35, with her debut novel First Year.
The book follows 17-year-old Maeve as she moves from Queensland to Melbourne to attend a prestigious drama school.
Rooted in Ross's own experience moving from the Gold Coast to Melbourne to train at the Victorian College of the Arts, First Year is billed as a book for fans of Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends and Coco Mellors's Cleopatra and Frankenstein.
"I searched for a story like this when I was a young actor in training and just never found it," Ross told The Australian.
"I'm excited for readers to have a book that takes the craft of acting seriously. Often, actors will find the process is either inflated, or made a mockery of, and I wanted to rectify that."
The prize includes publication, with First Year out now via Allen & Unwin. Past winners, including Tim Winton, Katherine Brabon and the late Gillian Mears, have gone on to become fixtures of Australian literature.
The two finalists for the 2024 Vogel were writer and actor Rob Johnson (Calamity Jane), for a collection of short stories, and Em Meller, for her novel about friendship between women.
However, after 44 years of incubating young literary talent, the $20,000 award has been replaced by the Australian Fiction Prize for an unpublished manuscript by an author of any age. The new prize, worth a total of $35,000, includes publication by HarperCollins.
— Hannah Story
Taylor Swift accused of chart-blocking Charli xcx's new album
The hype for Brat — the sixth album from British pop sensation Charli xcx — is very real. Even if you haven't heard its ravey, future-pop contents, you've likely been exposed to meme variations of its iconic green text if you've been online in the past week.
It's also one of the best-reviewed albums of Charli's career and her highest-charting effort in the US, debuting at #3 on the album charts (it also debuted at #3 in Australia).
In the pop star's native UK, however, Brat ended up being pipped to the post by… who else but Taylor Swift, whose latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, has now achieved a sixth non-consecutive week at #1 — her longest stint atop the UK charts.
Initially, the charts race was closely contested. On Thursday afternoon, the UK Official Charts said Charli xcx was on track for #1, until Tay Tay entered the ring with the release of a UK-exclusive version of The Tortured Poets Department.
Featuring live tracks and unreleased voice memos, the UK variant was only available for sale until midnight Thursday evening — the end of the chart tracking week — prompting a sudden surge in Swift streams and sales that kept her in pole position.
Charli stans were none too happy, accusing the Eras superstar of deliberately sabotaging Brat's chances of reaching #1.
Some have speculated the variant release was personal, pointing to the Brat song 'Sympathy is a knife', which is widely believed to be about Taylor Swift.
Do the main pop girlies really have beef? Or is the Taylor Swift juggernaut just too big to be stopped? Given the Eras Tour is currently rolling through Europe, it realistically could just be the latter.
Then again, Billie Eilish fans similarly lashed out at Swift last month, when the former's third album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, was kept from the top spot on the US charts by the latter pop billionaire unleashing three Tortured Poets Department variants in the same week.
Oh, and at last count? There are now a whopping 34 variants of Swift's new album out in the wild and smashing chart records.
Brat may have lost the sales battle but, with rave reviews and obsessive internet attention, it's arguably won the culture war.
— Al Newstead
Italian blockbuster wins top prize at Sydney Film Festival
Italian director Paola Cortellesi has won the Sydney Film Prize for There's Still Tomorrow, a $60,000 award given to an "audacious, cutting-edge and courageous" film.
The black-and-white drama — which bested Barbie and Oppenheimer in Italy's box office last year — stars the director as Delia, a woman in a toxic marriage in post-WWII Rome.
Announced on Sunday at closing night of the Sydney Film Festival, the jury celebrated the film's "intensely relevant" depiction of domestic violence:
"We relive every woman's struggle for equality through Cortellesi's "Delia," we face the brutal cycles of domestic violence with an immense empathy that ultimately proclaims and affirms the virtues of democracy. [There's Still Tomorrow] deftly weaves humour, style, and pop music into a dazzling black-and-white cinematic event, then it delivers an ending that will take your breath away," the international jury said in a statement.
The film beat out 11 others in the Official Competition, including documentary Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line and Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos's follow-up to the Oscar-winning Poor Things.
A set of additional awards were also announced at the closing ceremony.
Director James Bradley was awarded the $20,000 Documentary Australia Award for Welcome to Babel, about Chinese Australian artist Jiawei Shen.
The inaugural $35,000 First Nations Award went to New Zealand filmmaker Awanui Simich-Pene for her short film First Horse, which follows a young Māori girl in 1826.
For her documentary Black Snow, American filmmaker Alina Simone won the Sustainable Future Award, for a film that "highlights the urgent need for action to mitigate" the effects of climate change.
The Dendy Awards for Australian Short Films also awarded five prizes, with Pernell Marsden winning best director for The Meaningless Daydreams of Augie & Celeste.
The 2024 Sydney-UNESCO City of Film Award, worth $10,000, presented since 2016 to an exemplary NSW-based screen practitioner, was presented to producer Debbie Lee.
— Jared Richards
R.E.M. say they will never reform, then reform the next day
Alternative rock royalty R.E.M. broke all our hearts when they split up in 2011, after a 31-year career that saw them strike that all-too-rare balance of remaining critically adored while dominating the charts.
"A wise man once said, 'The skill in attending a party is knowing when it's time to leave,'" frontman Michael Stipe said at the time, and the band has remained annoyingly true to their word ever since.
Before being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York City on Thursday, the band granted a rare interview to American TV talk show CBS Mornings, where the following interaction took place.
Anthony Mason (CBS Host): What would it take to get you guys together one more time?
Mike Mills (bassist): A comet.
Bill Berry (drummer): Superglue
Anthony Mason: It ain't happening, is what you're saying?
Peter Buck (guitarist): No. It'd never be as good.
Which meant it was extra surprising when, the day after that interview aired, the four founding members of R.E.M. reunited for their first live public performance since 2008 (and their first with founding drummer Bill Berry since their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2007).
They performed just one song — a stripped back version of their iconic 1991 hit 'Losing My Religion'.
That said, don't hold your breath about this being the start of something bigger for the band. They remained adamant in their CBS interview that they'd pulled the pin at the right time, keeping both the band's legacy and their interpersonal relationships intact.
"We're here to tell the tale," Stipe told CBS. "We're sitting at the same table together with deep admiration and … lifelong friendship. A lot of people that do this can't claim that."
— Dan Condon
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2024-06-17 05:23:38Z
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