Thursday, February 13, 2025
Kris Bowers, Atticus Ross and Diane Warren were among the victors at the Society of Composers and Lyricists Awards, which took place in Los Angeles on Wednesday night. Singer-songwriter Colin Hay (of Men at Work fame) hosted. Bowers won best original score for a studio film for “The Wild Robot,” which has been cleaning up at other awards ceremonies of late, and Daniel Blumberg won original score for an indie for “The Brutalist.” (Both are also nominated for the Best Score Oscar.) In TV, Ross took home best original score for a TV series for FX’s “Shōgun” alongside collaborators Leopold Ross…
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” won Outstanding Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature, the top feature prize at the 23rd Annual Visual Effects Society Awards and the one that most closely corresponds to the Oscar for Best Visual Effects. The celebration of achievement in visual effects took place on Tuesday in Los Angeles. The sci-fi primate sequel beat “Dune: Part Two,” which went into the evening with the most nominations (seven) and emerged with the most wins (four): Outstanding Achievement in a Photoreal Feature, Outstanding CG Cinematography, Outstanding Effects Simulations in a Photoreal Feature and Outstanding Compositing & Lighting…
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Even by his standards Kanye West has had quite an unhinged few days bookended by varying types of pro-Nazi posturing. It’s so bad that on Monday night, Jimmy Kimmel wondered when the rapper will “just change his name to Ye-dolph and be done with it.” Before getting into Kimmel’s monologue, some quick backstory first. On Friday, West erupted into a multi-post rant on X (formerly Twitter), declaring “I love Hitler” and “I’m a Nazi,” among other things. Then on Sunday, he paid to run an ad for his clothing website Yeezy in several local markets during the Super Bowl —…
Monday, February 10, 2025
A pro-Palestinian protester rushed the field during Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance Sunday night before being tackled by stadium security. The person in question was dressed in the same clothing as the onstage dancers and appeared to have been cast as part of the performance before breaking away and raising a dual Palestinian and Sudanese flag over their head. The flag read “Sudan” and “Gaza” in correlation with their respective red, green and white flags. After jumping offstage, the demonstrator made their way through the dancers on the field for several seconds before being overtaken by three security officers…
Sunday, February 9, 2025
“The Wild Robot” was the big winner at the Annie Awards on Saturday evening, winning nine trophies at the annual ceremony that honors the best in animation as chosen by the Los Angeles branch of the International Animated Film Society, ASIFA-Hollywood. The DreamWorks Animation and Universal release dominated a ceremony that was at one point interrupted by a fire alarm that caused Royce Hall to be evacuated. It won Best Feature and also took awards for direction, FX, character animation, character design, music, production design, voice acting and editorial. It went into the show with 10 nominations and won in…
Saturday, February 8, 2025
The Washington Post and CNN have spent the last few months making very public, very ostentatious displays of fealty to Donald Trump, but nevertheless they’ve been added to the ranks of unfriendly media that are being kicked out of the Pentagon to make way for mostly right wing, pro-Trump outlets. CNN and Oliver Darcy reported that on Friday, the Pentagon informed WaPo, CNN, The Hill and The War Zone that they will lose office space at the facility this year as part of the so-called “media rotation program” announced by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth a week ago. Other outlets…
Friday, February 7, 2025
Well, shut my mouth. Just a few hours — I repeat, hours — after writing that Hollywood never releases a classic romantic movie on Valentine’s Day, I see a film that proves me wrong. It just happens to also be an ultraviolent slasher. Touché, Hollywood. You win this round. Then again with a film as good as Josh Ruben’s “Heart Eyes,” everyone’s a winner. Ruben is the director of the brilliant 2021 horror comedy Werewolves Within, hands down the best movie ever adapted from a video game. It comes as no surprise that his follow-up would do the same thing…
Thursday, February 6, 2025
Jimmy Kimmel was understandably rattled by Donald Trump’s shocking — and for now anyway, walked back — assertion that Palestinians should be forcibly removed from Gaza and the U.S. should illegally annex the land. “We have a very, very, we have a very crazy person running our country right now,” Kimmel declared during his monologue on Wednesday’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” “Like, like standing in the intersection loudly talking to himself crazy. Yesterday, Trump held a doozy of a press conference with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, where he surprised everyone, including the people who work for him,…
Wednesday, February 5, 2025
Jimmy Kimmel isn’t a fan of prominent anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a man who frequently denies his anti-vaccines views despite clear documentation going back decades — And on Tuesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” he had some harsh words for Republicans who voted to advance Kennedy’s nomination to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. “It was stupor Tuesday in Washington today,” Kimmel said during his monologue. “Senators voted along party lines to advance the nominations of Trump’s pick for National Security Director Tulsi Gabbard, a woman who appears to have been styled by Cruella DeVille. And RFK Jr., who…
Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Stephen Colbert’s live “Late Night” audience – not a fan of Donald Trump’s tireless weekend of executive orders, it turns out. “It’s hard to know where to start,” Colbert began in his Monday dialogue. “Each and every one of Trump’s disastrous moves deserves top billing.” Colbert got into the list, with each reference bringing down a torrent of boos from the New York City studio audience. “Over the weekend, Trump and his people gave Elon Musk access to the Treasury’s payment system [mild boos], prepared to shut down U.S. aid [boooos], threatened to take back the Panama Canal [boo], fired…