As Eurovision Fades, Cannes Will Rise

A look forward, and a peek back. Plus, this "Matty Healy" person sure seems bad?!?

Bonjour! Good news for lovers of film and dramatic red carpet outfits alike: The Cannes Film Festival starts today, and while most publications are delving into pressing issues like which screenings are we looking forward to,

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or whom we most want to see on the red carpet,

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Drinks With Broads dives deep into the question, “What can a Wikipedia Wormhole teach us about Cannes?” and emerges with a dozen answers, ranging from stuff about Mussolini to iffy parking situations to fake dead birds and cursed colons.

Let us set the scene: First and foremost, the entry for Cannes The Town is beset with notes from beleaguered Wiki editors shrieking that not enough people have cited their sources and that many items need verification, and it does seem very thin for the entry of a noteworthy location. It did, however, teach me — and thereby also you — the following:

1: “It took the Man in the Iron Mask 11 years to leave the tiny, forested St. Marguerite Island,” which is right off the coast of the city. “His cell can be visited in the Fort of St. Marguerite, now renamed the Musée de la Mer (Museum of the Sea). This museum also houses discoveries from shipwrecks off the island, including Roman (1st century BC) and Saracen (10th century AD) ceramics.” I love shipwrecks and ceramics and also Friday Night Lights’s Matt “No Relation” Saracen! The museum garnered a fairly enthusiastic four stars on TripAdvisor, although one visitor noted, “It is like attending a boring over-head projector presentation when you have access to all the new medias. Disappointing.” (The views look fantastic, though.) Wiki told me you can get there by ferry and it’s also allegedly got great trees

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Luckily, the entry for Cannes The Film Festival is considerably more robust, and that’s the event we’re here for, anyway. Forget your Saracen ceramics! On that note, Professor Wikipedia taught me much. Ahem:

2: Cannes Film Festival was created in 1938 because the only international film festival in existence at the time was the one in Venice, which was unfortunately super into fascism at that moment in history: “Mussolini and Adolf Hitler respectively overruled the jury's decision in order to award the Coppa Mussolini (Mussolini Cup) for the best film to Italian war film Luciano Serra, Pilot, produced under the supervision of Mussolini's son,” as well as to the Leni Riefenstahl propaganda flick Olympia, “despite the fact that the regulations at that time prohibited awarding a documentary.”  Pro tip: The appearance of Hitler and the Nazis is a sure sign that whatever Wiki Deep Dive you’re undertaking is about to take a terrible turn. Anyway, as you can imagine, the Brits, the Americans, and the French folks on the jury that year were — correctly! — “outraged by the decision and as a measure of protest… decided to withdraw from the festival with the intention of not returning. The snub encouraged the French to found a free festival.” Voila, Cannes – although the inaugural outing was cut short because the Nazis invaded Poland on its second day. Jean Zay, one of the festival’s founders, also shortly thereafter became a member of the French resistance. Tragically, he was killed by the Vichy militia in 1944.  Interestingly, the Wiki entry for the Venice Film Festival somewhat glosses over this and does not even mention Hitler, in yet another example of why you should not treat Wiki as your primary source of information, something I clearly do all the time anyway.

3. The film festival shuttered, obviously, for the duration of the war. When it returned in 1946, they accidentally aired The Three Musketeers upside down and showed Notorious backwards. Listen, everyone had just had A VERY STRESSFUL GO OF IT, let’s cut folks some slack. Things continued fairly regularly until 1968, when the festival shut down due to massive civil unrest in France, and then of course in 2020, it was canceled due to Covid.

4. For you folks interested in dramatic weather and/or architectural mishaps: Roofs have blown off more than once, and not in a fun idiomatic way. Cannes is notoriously windy, and the lid of the Palais de Festival literally blew off during its opening weekend in the forties, and the top of one of its temporary theatres collapsed in 2012.

5. We all remember that time the Cannes Powers That Be tried (ridiculously) to ban flats for women, but where was the outcry when selfies were allegedly prohibited on the red carpet back in 2015? Free the selfie!

5a. Fun fact: The red carpet itself wasn’t even instituted until 1987.

6: This list of Juries is fascinating; 1998 was, in particular, a banger.

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This year, your Cannes Jury consists of: Maryam Touzani, Damián Szifrón, Denis Ménochet, Brie Larson, Paul Dano, Rungano Nyoni, Atiq Rahimi, and Julia Ducournau, and is being led by Triangle of Sadness director Ruben Östlund, who broke into the biz by making (instructional?) ski movies. Now you’re ready if this question comes up at pub trivia. 

7. Related, the jury always meets at a place called Villa Domergue to pick the winners. This villa was built for Jean-Gabriel Domergue, a painter who, per his own Wiki, “claimed to be the inventor of the pin-up." Wikipedia goes all CITATION NEEDED over this factoid, although I totally get what Jean-Gabriel meant, looking at his work. He also worked for designer Paul Poiret and then went and “died on a sidewalk.” We get no further info about this sidewalk death, which is a personal affront to those of us who read Wiki solely for drama, gossip, and finding out how people kicked it. (In fairness to Wiki, the New York Times reported that the police did not give a cause of death, and also notes that the man was “an eccentric.”) In other important villa-related intel, our friends at Trip Advisor say Villa Domergue has a great view but, alas, parking may be a mess.

8. The big prize at Cannes is The Palme d’Or, the statuette of which is a (duh) “palm… made from 4.16 oz (118 g) of 18-carat yellow gold while the branch's base forms a small heart. The Palme d'or rests on a dainty crystal cushion shaped like an emerald-cut diamond. A single piece of cut crystal forms a cushion for the palm, which is hand-cast into a wax mould and now presented in a case of blue Morocco leather.” Sounds fancy and also possibly stabby. It’s currently designed by Chopard, but “the original design by Parisian jeweller Lucienne Lazon, inspired by a sketch by director Jean Cocteau, had the bevelled lower extremity of the stalk forming a heart, and the pedestal a sculpture in terracotta by the artist Sébastien” La di dah! I’m informed — this time by French Wikipedia — that Lucienne Lazon was “a convinced feminist.” Good for her

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! She probably would have insisted on wearing flats to this thing.

9. I must note that festival’s Wiki felt like it went a little light on non-Nazi, non-shoe-related controversies, so I turned to the rest of the internet to help complete this primer. CNN delivered with a reminder that Kiki Dunst once had to sit through a Cannes press conference where Lars Von Trier called himself (jokingly but still) a Nazi and said he understands Hitler

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. He was banned from Cannes for life after that, and then of course unbanned seven years later, because auteurs apparently get free passes. (Lars’s Wiki is NOT short on controversies, as he seems generally terrible.) Last year, Deadline got mad because the festival tried to exercise editorial control over an interview they did with Thierry Frémaux, the festival’s head – a man who is currently in a PR imbroglio because French actress Adèle Haenel just retired from the business due to “the French film industry's ‘general complacency ... vis-à-vis sexual aggressors” and he got salty about it. He’s also being defensive about choosing the new Johnny Depp movie to open this year’s slate, so he might have a bumpy week ahead. 

10. And of course, speaking of scandals — or sCannesdals? No — none of us who read this 2015 piece in The Hollywood Reporter will ever forget it:  “The Other Side of Cannes, Exposed: Debauchery, Danger and the Dirty Secrets Aboard the Super-Rich’s Superyachts.” (Trigger warning for… a lot of things.) On the topic of folks who love to be on yachts in Cannes

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, and The Man in Iron Mask, Leonardo diCaprio has a film premiering at the festival this year – Scorsese’s adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon – so get ready for 100 stories about whatever 24-year-old model he gloms onto this time.

Although… is he still allegedly dating Gigi Hadid, even though she is about to shrivel and die on the vine at the impossibly ancient age of 28? Will they use this moment to go public? Will she come to her senses? Time, and probably Entertainment Tonight, will tell.

11. I’ll also never forget the time noted a-hole and Kyrsten Sinema megafan Vincent Gallo cursed Roger Ebert’s colon. For real. Ebert, along with everyone else who saw it, dared to (correctly) hate The Brown Bunny, the movie in which Sevigny allegedly actually performed real oral sex on Gallo

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; he called it “the worst film in the history of the festival” and, later, “one of the most disastrous screenings [he] had ever attended.” It was always a bad idea to get into it with Ebert, because he could out-write basically anyone, which he certainly did in this instance, noting “I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny.” (Noteworthily, Gallo then re-edited the film and Ebert re-reviewed it far more positively.)

12. Finally, thank god I wasn’t paying too much attention to things when this crazy stunt happened in 2001:

It must have seemed a great wheeze at the time: Get a few craz-ee young actors to toss fake dead pigeons around in the water off the Majestic Beach in order to publicize 24 Hour Party People, the upcoming Michael Winterbottom film about the Manchester music scene in the 1980s. Problem is, the actors, impersonating notoriously uncontrollable band Happy Mondays, were just a bit too deeply in character. And the pigeons, with real feathers and scaly feet, were a tad too realistic. The result: Diners at the Majestic Beach restaurant found themselves being pelted by what they thought were real dead birds.

Basically, everyone got kicked out of everything for this little fiasco – but Roger Ebert loved that film, and no colons were cursed. Let’s see if everyone makes it out of the next ten days with their organs, and careers, intact — and without any fake birds coming to rest atop their club sandwiches. As far as the red carpet goes… anything could happen.

— Jessica

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Who’s the Anti-Hero?

I copped recently to being extremely allergic to the rumor about Taylor Swift dating this Matty Healy dude from the band The 1975, and apparently I’m not the only one, although I didn’t know the half of it. Buzzfeed just published a piece outlining the ways that The Grown Man Who Calls Himself Matty is a garbage human, and please be aware before you click that the article is upsetting and contains descriptions of racist and misogynistic behavior. This isn’t a situation where Healy simply might want to apologize for something he did ages ago (though there’s some of that, too). The crux of it is stuff he said on a podcast in February of this year — an episode both Apple and Spotify removed because it was so offensive — including a story he gleefully told about using a porn site that I had never heard of and whose name I won’t repeat, which sounds UNBELIEVABLY foul, exploitative, and racist. Fans were underwhelmed before and seem upset now.

I have complicated feelings about dumping Healy’s behavior on Swifty’s doorstep — let’s not get more angry at the woman who might be in his life than we are at the man himself; his mistakes are not hers — but I also agree that he seems, to put it mildly, super duper gross and their association is a head-scratcher. If your actual non-parasocial friend were dating him, you’d be concerned as hell, raising all kinds of eyebrows, and debating whether it’s worth risking the friendship to speak your piece. Certainly Taylor Swift, in a tale as old as time and like many young women before and after her, may be cursed with a lousy picker — John Mayer is Exhibits A through D, and Jake Gyllenhaal doesn’t sound like a peach either — so perhaps this is just how she’s hard-wired, and there will be a few more turkeys before she gets another Joe Alwyn. But it’s a VERY strange look for someone as image-careful and tightly guarded as Taylor is, and hard to imagine (but not impossible) that she’s known him for ten years and just never… got a whiff of this aspect of his personality? Fans are fretting that she knows and just doesn’t care — or, to be clear, one subset of Swifties is; it’s easy to forget that not everybody is Extremely Online, or that half of them are way more likely to see Page Six’s piece about them being caught holding hands than this bit of news. So the fan furor may be a storm in the proverbial Internet tea cup, from Taylor’s point of view.

Still, damage control might already be happening: Hours after the Buzzfeed piece dropped, People posted a story about Taylor’s dad hanging out with Matty at one of her shows, as if to bless the union. Maaaaybe Team Swift didn’t plant that for this reason — it’s certainly possible it was already in the hopper, ready to go — but it’s convenient timing at best. If it was a planned drop to offset Buzzfeed, and People is for sure where you go if you want to bury a bad headline with a puff piece, that feels like a double-down and therefore is not the reaction many of us would have hoped to see. I’m sure this is a lot more complicated than Taylor being like, “Eh, you might be a creep but let’s bang anyway,” and it’s not as if she is going to dump a guy because the Internet hates that she’s with him. But you DEFINITELY can, and arguably should, dump a guy for everything in that Buzzfeed article. As for what drew her to him in the first place… the human heart is a box of mysteries, and she might want to solve that one. Because the more I see and read about this dude, the more I think… him? Can it possibly be worth it?

— Heather

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That’s a Wrap on Eurovision 2023

Eurovision Week, especially if you read our website, can be overwhelming for people who do not observe this religion. But we are a warm and welcoming collective that just wants to help everyone fall in love with fire cannons and Norwegian cultural music and basically all things Malta, so I thought I’d give the musically curious abstainers a little starter playlist if they want to dip a toe into the tunes on Apple Music (or whatever service you use). Eurovision songs all clock in around three minutes, so these are short, snacky bops you can use to intrigue and startle all your loved ones. Dylan asked me what was for dinner the other night, and I replied, “MAMA, kupila traktora,” which is Croatian for “Mommy bought a tractor” and comes from the Let 3 entry that disparages Putin as “Armageddon Granny.” He was perplexed.

Quick primer: The live Eurovision Song Contest, which has taken place annually since 1956

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, is the greatest single event in the history of time, EVER, fight me. It is one of the longest-running TV programs in history and THE longest-running international music competition (although, is that category basically a party of one?). It grew from seven participating countries to as many as 43 in 2018

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, with several out-of-region additions like Australia -- huge megafans who really just wanted to come along for the ride -- and Russia, which is now banned, but before that was breaking a real sweat trying to win the trophy. Eurovision launched or augmented the careers of ABBA, Celine Dion, Olivia Newton-John (she finished fourth behind ABBA), and Julio Iglesias, and has spawned songs that became hits by other artists ("Volare," "Eres tu"). Entries range from delightful to deranged. Ireland, in 2007, sent a rapping turkey puppet to do a song about how shit their entries had been recently. Russia once sent bread-baking dancing grannies. In the past few years, Eurovision winners and also-rans have broken out into Sirius XM Radio, with Italy's Maneskin enjoying the most widespread mainstream success with appearances everywhere from The Voice to The Tonight Show to the AMAs. It helps that they dress like horny, lost vampires.

Eurovision tradition holds that, even though the public votes, somehow nobody’s favorite ever wins, leading to a lot of lively debates. But the most special part is the way fans and musicians of all these countries come together and party their brains out for a week, with love — like the Olympics, but instead of sweat coming out of their pores, it’s most likely booze. We tease about the cheese inherent in some of the participating acts, but honestly, a) that’s what we WANT, b) cheese sincerely isn’t always bad, and c) while plenty of contenders go the safe route with an English-language song that’s conventionally poppy, several acts perform in their own languages, using their own cultural symbolism and rhythms, tapping a vein that the rest of us are sincerely lucky to get to experience. I encourage watching, but Eurovision’s YouTube channel is tragically geo-restricted

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. I’ve linked to U.S.-compatible official music videos or bootlegs (sorry) where I can find them, or you can try watching Peacock’s stream, with the caveat that Semifinal 1's audio there was so bad that I gave up on it. Apple Music has Eurovision playlists from the last few years and scattershot selections from pre-2021. Of the (mostly) recent crop, here's where I’d start if you want to get a taste — with apologies for being so 2023 heavy, but it’s freshest in my head:

Songs You Will Belt Out In Your Car, or The Shower, Even Though You Only Really Know Part of Them

• “Queen of the Kings,” Alessandra, Norway 2023. This was in my head when I woke up yesterday, but I don’t know the words so mostly it was phonetic mumbling. It sounds a tad like the Pirates of the Caribbean theme music, but with 100 percent less Johnny Depp.

• “Watergun,” Remo Ferrer, Switzerland 2023. The sentiment is a little cookie-cutter — guns are bad, we can all agree — but I was surprised at how the chorus of this one stuck with me.

• “Better Love,” Katerine Duska, Greece 2019. Shit, I’m singing it right now. I also want Anne Hathaway to play Duska in a movie based on this trippy official music video.

• “Tattoo,” Loreen, Sweden 2023. I tend to whistle this one because I am an alto, but if you can belt, BELT — and applaud the way she attempts to rhyme “all” with “love.”

• “Husavik,” My Marianne and Will Ferrell. This is the climactic song from the Eurovision movie, and guys, it’s great. Yes, you’ll giggle a little when Will arrives, but on-screen it’s very earnest and lovely so carry that knowledge with you and ride the Icelandic love wave.

Dancey Songs With Hooks You Will Be Singing During Dinner, And Probably Also In Random Public Places

• “I Wrote a Song,” Mae Muller, U.K. 2023. I dare you not to DA-DA DA DA DA DAAAA your way around your house, or while you’re picking out avocados.

• Évidemment, La Zarra, France, 2023. The more I listen to this one, the more I think she got hosed. She clearly agreed, as I think she flipped the bird to the TV audience. But this one should have been Top 10 for sure.

• “Who The Hell is Edgar?”, Salena & Teya, Austria 2023. I did not anticipate unloading groceries while chanting, “Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe-Poe Poe Poe, Edgar Allen Poe…” And yet, I would and will do it again.

• “Cha Cha Cha,” Käärijä, Finland 2023. This song is SO much grouchier than you expect it to be, but that refrain does the job.

• “Ooh, Aah, Just A Little Bit,” Gina G. An oldie! But this was a legit hit. The UK’s 1996 entry is a fantastic road trip song, for when you’re JUST leaving your house and the sun is shining and you’re so excited, and you’re not yet numb in any of your nethers, and your shins haven’t yet rebelled.

Songs With A Lovely Chill Vibe

• “Love Is On My Side,” The Black Mamba, Portugal, 2021. His voice has a Macy Gray quality. There are probably more of these, but I ran out of time.

Songs For When You Want to Shout “VOILA!!!” At People With Increasing Fervor

• “Voila,” Barbara Pravi, France, 2021. There probably are not more of these.

Songs That Do A Great Job Incorporating Their Culture, As Far As These Ears Can Tell

• “Spirit In The Sky,” KEiiNO, Norway, 2019. Trust me. It delivers EVERYTHING you want, including fire, and a giant digital antlered deity.

• “Ai Coração,” Mimecat, Portugal 2023. This song is like coffee. It will wake you right up.

• “Trenulețul,” Zdob și Zdub and Frații Advahov, Moldova, 2022. This is not the Eurovision performance; it’s more… wintry? But the fiddle! The demi-rapping! The refrain that’s super easy to pick up on! Tap those toes, my friends.

Songs That Really Don’t Seem To Have Anything To Do With Their Culture

• “Yodel It!” by Ilinca feat Alex Florea, Romania, 2017. I do not believe, though please correct me if need be, that Romanians are known for their yodeling. Also, at the actual show, he rode a cannon.

Songs That Objectively Might Not Be Excellent But Which You Should Sample Out of Curiosity

• “10 Years,” Daði Freyr og Gagnamagnið, Iceland 2021. They got Covid and had to use their second rehearsal for the actual show. I can’t find a proper clip, but someone posted this video shot from INSIDE the arena during that rehearsal, and at least you’ll get the sense of it.

• Gravity,” Kate Miller-Heidke, Australia, 2019. This is Kate Bush crossed with opera crossed with being rocked back and forth on a hidden bendy pole. You have to see it. WHAT IF THE POLE HAD SNAPPED. (It didn’t.) Honestly, why didn’t this win? This entire thing is hypnotic and at the end you get to SEE the pole.

• “Mama SC,” Let 3, Croatia, 2023. This is about what a dink Putin is, and it kicks things up an octave around the 1:46 mark. This is a vid from inside the final, if you’re curious.

• “Hard Rock Hallelujah,” Lordi, Finland 2006. They’re a monster rock band — I’m dead serious — and I still cannot believe they won. In a good way. Others have since tried to capture the Lordi magic, but it starts here.

• “Give That Wolf a Banana,” Subwoolfer, Norway 2022. It speaks for itself.

• “Russian Woman,” Manizha, Russia, 2019. Okay, I know, she’s from Russia and that’s tricky — but she’s also an LGBTQ+ activist, and this was a feminist rap, and in 2022 she was blacklisted in her country for speaking out against the war.

• “Dancing Lasha Tumbai,” Verka Serduchka, Ukraine 2007. Great if you love accordions, and human mylar balloons.

• “I Don’t Feel Hate,” Jendrik, Germany, 2021. This is just a short clip, but you’ll see the woman dancing in a giant rubber hand and get the idea. Do I even need to tell you it finished last, with only three points? If he didn’t feel hate before, he might have then.

Songs That Make Eurovision Feel More Legit Because They’re On Mainstream Radio

• “Snap,” Rosa Linn, Armenia 2022.

• “Arcade,” Duncan Laurence, Netherlands 2019 (winner).

• “Storm,” Victor Crone, Estonia 2019. I call him Swedish Oliver Hudson, because that’s where he’s from. I heard this on Love Island U.S.A. and shrieked. I felt like a proud parent.

• “ZITTI E BUONI,” Maneskin, Italy 2021. Because their much older cover of “Beggin’” is in English, that’s the song that somehow swept our nation after their Eurovision victory. It’s fine, but to me it’s inferior and watered-down, lacking the edge and the awesome Italian roar of “Zitti.”

• “Space Man,” Sam Ryder, U.K.., 2022. Sam, described by many as a delightful Labrador of a person, probably would have won if Ukraine hadn’t been receiving understandable extra public support due to the war (though Ukraine traditionally fares quite well here, and they were good!). This popped up at the end of The School for Good and Evil on Netflix, which was… not a good movie, but an exciting get for Sam.

Songs That Could Hang on Mainstream Radio

• “Hold Me Closer,” Cornelia Jakobs, Sweden 2022. This one feels... melodically related to “Shallow” by Lady Gaga, in the chorus at least.

• “Like an Animal,” Piqued Jacks, San Marino 2023. SUCH a boring performance that I wrote off the song, but then came back around to it when I was mainlining the playlist.

• “Je me casse,” Destiny, Malta 2021. Malta’s entry this year had a saxophone and so does this one; I need to explore whether they have a particular fondness for it.

• “Fallen Angel,” TIX, Norway, 2021. He’s the one who performed as an angel. He’s also a mental-health advocate who was bullied as a kid for having Tourette’s (tics = TIX), so ENJOY YOUR FEELS.

• “Power,” Dilja, Iceland 2023. She didn’t get past the semi, either. UNJUST!

• “What They Say,” Victor Vernicos, Greece, 2023. Some poor Love Islander will wander off-screen at the end of an episode, crying off all that methodically applied contouring, while this song plays.

• “Breaking My Heart,” Reiley, Denmark 2023. I guess he’s a TikTok’er? Vocally he was terrible, but the produced version of this is catchy as hell.

Songs You Are Kind of Embarrassed To Admit You Like Because They Are Such Naked Pandering To The Whole Thing

• “We Are One,” Wild Youth, Ireland, 2023. Um, hello, they didn’t sing with GLITTER BAGS on their HEADS in actual Eurovision. That might have helped? Also kids don’t try it at home, etc. Anyway, I said it on our site: This felt like they were trying to write a song Eurovision would buy and use as an official broadcast theme song, and I also think they closed their eyes and imagined yelling “TONIGHT, WE ARE ONNNNNNE” under a deluge of confetti. They got ahead of themselves; this didn’t even make the final, but dammit, it’s catchy. IT IS. Stop it.

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Last Call:

—The Tony Awards have been trying REALLY hard to figure out how to hold their upcoming show on June 11 in spite of the writers’ strike, and as of Monday evening, it appears the show — as they say! — will go on. The WGA denied their request for a waiver, which would have allowed for a traditional show, but have agreed not to actively picket the show itself, presumably because the Tony Awards are a vital part of keeping many Broadway shows afloat and axing it would have a terrible ripple effect on many of the WGA’s allies. This opens the door for folks to attend without having to cross a picket line, although I am not sure if I think there will be a traditional red carpet, and as of this writing, no one was sure what host Ariana DeBose was planning to do. The New York Times reports “the revised broadcast would include the presentation of key awards and live performances of songs from Broadway shows, but that it would not feature any scripted material by screenwriters in its opening number or comedic patter…[or] use any part of a draft script that had been written before the screenwriters’ strike began.” Sounds like it might be weird, but strikes aren’t supposed to be easy, and it’s better than nothing. — J

— The Cannes archives at Go Fug Yourself are, as you might imagine, vast, and a fun place to perhaps procrastinate on that spreadsheet. In addition to our contemporaneous coverage of the festival, you can also go back in time with us to the Cannes of 1962,  explore Aishwarya Rai’s Cannes history (it is MAJOR), or look at all this widely varied stuff Madonna wore. — J

— Finally, last week, the paid subscribers got this very unhinged situation, wherein Heather waxes poetic about Jury Duty and The Diplomat (among other things), and Jessica takes us on a field trip to a VERY WACKY MUSEUM INDEED in our latest Enter Through the Gift Shop:

In Which Heather "Hits the Bar," and Jessica "Gets Crabs"

Heather Cocks & Jessica Morgan

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May 11

The words "The Arch Fishop Squidwin of Crabterbury" are invoked.

Read full story

1. With answers like “the new Indiana Jones” and “the new Wes Anderson” and “the possible trainwreck that is The Idol, the new HBO show from the Weeknd, starring him and Lily-Rose Depp, which looks honestly terrible.”

2. Which begets an answer in some form of “Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, ScarJo, Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, and Alicia Vikander,” all of whom are allegedly on the docket this year, alongside juror Brie Larson.

3. BUT DOES IT HAVE A GIFT SHOP??? —H

4. That page is also how I found out that Javier Bardem is a Nepo Baby!

5. I misread this as “a convicted feminist,” to which I would ALSO say good for her. —H

6. I guess this is technically still about Nazis? Ugh.

7. Although I’m not implying anything untoward, please don’t sue me.

8. She and Gallo were rumored to be romantic partners at the time, but she doesn’t seem to have much love in her heart for him anymore, and I can’t blame her.

9. Except for in 2020, the Covid-cancelled year, when Iceland — in a neat bit of symmetry — was a hot favorite to win, just as the movie Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga came out… centered on Iceland being a perennial longshot.

10. They have set a maximum of 44; this year, they had 37.

11. I have NordVPN because I need to watch curling and Big Brother Canada, and that does the trick. Not an ad!