West Hamare monitoring threeManchester Unitedplayers to potentially sign this summer. England defender Harry Maguire, 29, Scotland midfielder Scott McTominay, 26, and France forward Anthony Martial, 27, are all on the London club's radar.(Football Insider)
Arsenalare desperate to signBorussia Dortmundand Germany midfielder Julian Brandt, 26.(Bulinews via Bild)
MLS commissioner Don Garber said it will likely take a creative, David Beckham-like deal to land Lionel Messi, 35, but the league andInter Miamiare willing to be flexible to find the right compensation package in order to land the Argentina andParis St-Germainforward.(Athletic - subscription required)
Emile Smith Rowe, 22, may be looking for a new club this summer asArsenalare willing to sell the England midfielder.(Fichajes - in Spanish)
AC Milan,Inter MilanandJuventusare all on "high alert" to signLiverpooland Brazil forward Roberto Firmino after it was announced the 31-year-old will be leaving the Premier League club.(Football Italia)
Tottenham Hotspurand England striker Harry Kane, 29, will stay at the club if they signSouthamptonand England midfielder James Ward-Prowse, 28.(talkSPORT)
Chelsea'sowners do not see 29-year-old Belgium striker Romelu Lukaku, currently on loan atInter Milan,as part of their ongoing project, despite the club's lack of success in front of goal.(Gazzetta dello Sport, via Mail)
Paris St-Germainand Argentina midfielder Leandro Paredes, who is on loan toJuventus, is expected to return to the Fench capital at the end of the season. The Italian club are not expected to trigger the option to buy the 28-year-old.(Fabrizio Romano)
Atletico Madridare going to offerAthletic Bilbaoand Spain defender Inigo Martinez a deal this summer as the 31-year-old is set to leave on a free transfer.(Diario AS - in Spanish)
Manchester Unitedare keeping tabs onRomaand England forward Tammy Abraham, 25.(inews)
Chelsea'sboard are split over manager Graham Potter's future because of the club's lacklustre season. The Englishman, 47, does have the backing of owner Todd Boehly.(Mail Online)
Spain defender Sergio Reguilon, 26, could leaveAtletico Madridthis summer amid rumours manager Diego Simeone is not happy with his performances.(Marca - in Spanish)
Evertonand Belgium midfielder Amadou Onana, 21, is open to leaving the Toffees this summer.(So Foot - in French)
Manchester Unitedhave rekindled their interest inBarcelonaand Netherlands midfielder Frenkie de Jong, 25.(talkSPORT)
Aston Villaare set for a three-way transfer battle this summer withEvertonandWest HamoverFlamengo'sprolific 25-year-old Brazil striker Pedro.(Fichajes, via Birmingham Mail)
Kody Brown may or may not be in the market for a new sister wife.
But this we can now say for certain:
The self-centered TLC personality was not escorting a potential spouse through a hotel lobby in Las Vegas a few days ago.
Contrary to popular belief around social media.
As you may have heard, an observer snapped a photo of Kody and Robyn (his sole remaining wife) in Sin City late last week as they walked around with a blonde woman in a crop top.
Considering Kody and Robyn are both polygamists… and considering they are currently in a marriage with just two people… many folks around the Internet presumed this individual might be their next partner.
Alas.
She has since been identified.
The woman in question was Robyn’s sister, Taralyce Sullivan, who lives in Las Vegas.
This rumor was much ado about nothing at all, but those who made a big deal out of the sighting can be forgiven.
Kody, after all, was dumped in late 2021 by Christine Brown and then about a year later by Janelle and Meri Brown.
Not long before this mysterious Las Vegas sighting, news broke that he and Robyn actually were in the market for a brand new mate… it just didn’t exactly work out for the controversial couple.
Kody and Robyn Brown don’t look especially thrilled to be sitting and talking to the Sister Wives camera here, do they?
“They have been courting a new potential wife for about three months,” Pauline Bithell, co-host of the Tender Loving Care…? podcast, previously claimed to The Sun.
Bithell went on to even say “they started filming [the courtship] around December, but they’ve been chatting online and via phone calls for about three months previous to that.”
Indeed, Sister Wives fans, there’s a specific woman at the center of this story.
And TLC cameras allegedly filmed her relationship with Kody for Season 18
“They were actively seeking this woman through dating websites, which they claim they’ve never done before,” continued the podcast co-host in regard to Kody and Robyn.
The potential spouse is reportedly in her 20s, has never been involved in the polygamous lifestyle in America and is South American.
About a month ago, shortly after Janelle confirmed she had split from Kody, speculation started to speculate that Kody was in the market for another lover.
A production source tells The Sun, meanwhile, that Kody, his only remaining wife and this unnamed woman — along with a filming crew and producers — met at a resort in Mexico in early 2023.
After hanging out a bit with Kody and Robyn, the unnamed individual reportedly felt “uncomfortable” and “told production she wanted to go home and didn’t want to continue filming.”
“Apparently, my source tells me that this woman wanted zero to do with Kody and Robyn,” Pauline now says.
“She was pretty much wanting to get out of the situation immediately.
“My source said that she was very uncomfortable with the whole situation. She said she didn’t like their energy.”
Kody Brown is staring daggers into Christine in this scene from the first episode of Sister Wives Season 17.
Kody, according to this report, feels “absolutely humiliated by it all and he doesn’t want this to air.”
But why would TLC possibly listen to him?!? This is incredible material for Season 18.
“A lot of the focus has been on this woman, which is why it’s been such a devastation to him,” The Sun adds.
“He really believed that this was gonna be his next wife.”
How tragic, right? Who wants to break out the world’s smallest violin for Kody?!?
Real Madridwill evaluate the long-term futures of Croatia's Luka Modric, 37, and 33-year-old German and fellow midfielder Toni Kroos before committing to a move for England andBorussia Dortmund's19-year-old midfielder Jude Bellingham, who has been urged to reject a switch toLiverpool.(Diario AS, via Mirror)
Real Madridare also keeping tabs onNewcastle's25-year-old Brazilian midfielder Bruno Guimaraes for the remainder of the 2022-2023 season as a potential alternative option to Bellingham.(Mundo Deportivo - in Spanish)
Liverpoolwill be frontrunners in the race to signChelsea'sEngland midfielder Mason Mount this summer, if the 24-year-old is unable to agree a new contract at Stamford Bridge.(Mail)
Chelseahave renewed their interest inRB Leipzigdefender Josko Gvardiol, 21, withManchester CityandTottenhamalso keen on the Croatia international who has a £97m release clause in his contract that comes into effect from 2024.(Times - subscription required)
Inter Milanare hoping to sign Naby Keita, 28, this summer when the Guinea midfielder's contract expires atLiverpooland have already held encouraging talks with his representatives.(La Gazzetta dello Sport - in Italian)
Lyon'sFrench midfielder Houssem Aouar, 24, is close to signing forEintracht Frankfurton a free transfer after turning down a move toManchester United.(Sport1, via Mirror)
Barcelonacould sell some of their biggest stars as the troubled club look to raise £178m, with Brazil winger Raphinha, 26, among those who could be offloaded.(Sun)
Manchester Unitedhave joinedChelseaandArsenalin keeping tabs onSouthampton's19-year-old Belgian midfielder Romeo Lavia.(Mail)
Tottenhamare eyeing a summer move forBristol Citymidfielder Alex Scott. The 19-year-old England youth international is also interestingCrystal PalaceandWest Ham.(Sun)
Negotiations are ongoing betweenManchester Unitedand David de Gea. The Spanish goalkeeper, 32, is out of contract in the summer, but keen to remain at Old Trafford.(Fabrizio Romano)
Manchester Unitedhave received loan enquiries from clubs in Turkey for their 21-year-old England forward Mason Greenwood, who is still currently suspended by the club despite criminal charges against him being dropped in February.(Telegraph)
Napoliremain confident of keeping hold of Georgia winger Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, 22, despite interest fromManchester City,Chelsea,Real MadridandBarcelona.(90min)
Real Madridwill evaluate the long-term futures of Croatia's Luka Modric, 37, and 33-year-old German and fellow midfielder Toni Kroos before committing to a move for England andBorussia Dortmund's19-year-old midfielder Jude Bellingham, who has been urged to reject a switch toLiverpool.(Diario AS, via Mirror)
Real Madridare also keeping tabs onNewcastle's25-year-old Brazilian midfielder Bruno Guimaraes for the remainder of the 2022-2023 season as a potential alternative option to Bellingham.(Mundo Deportivo - in Spanish)
Liverpoolwill be frontrunners in the race to signChelsea'sEngland midfielder Mason Mount this summer, if the 24-year-old is unable to agree a new contract at Stamford Bridge.(Mail)
Chelseahave renewed their interest inRB Leipzigdefender Josko Gvardiol, 21, withManchester CityandTottenhamalso keen on the Croatia international who has a £97m release clause in his contract that comes into effect from 2024.(Times - subscription required)
Inter Milanare hoping to sign Naby Keita, 28, this summer when the Guinea midfielder's contract expires atLiverpooland have already held encouraging talks with his representatives.(La Gazzetta dello Sport - in Italian)
Lyon'sFrench midfielder Houssem Aouar, 24, is close to signing forEintracht Frankfurton a free transfer after turning down a move toManchester United.(Sport1, via Mirror)
Barcelonacould sell some of their biggest stars as the troubled club look to raise £178m, with Brazil winger Raphinha, 26, among those who could be offloaded.(Sun)
Manchester Unitedhave joinedChelseaandArsenalin keeping tabs onSouthampton's19-year-old Belgian midfielder Romeo Lavia.(Mail)
Tottenhamare eyeing a summer move forBristol Citymidfielder Alex Scott. The 19-year-old England youth international is also interestingCrystal PalaceandWest Ham.(Sun)
Negotiations are ongoing betweenManchester Unitedand David de Gea. The Spanish goalkeeper, 32, is out of contract in the summer, but keen to remain at Old Trafford.(Fabrizio Romano)
Manchester Unitedhave received loan enquiries from clubs in Turkey for their 21-year-old England forward Mason Greenwood, who is still currently suspended by the club despite criminal charges against him being dropped in February.(Telegraph)
Napoliremain confident of keeping hold of Georgia winger Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, 22, despite interest fromManchester City,Chelsea,Real MadridandBarcelona.(90min)
What is HBO Max dune? The Dune television series, Dune: The Sisterhood, may be in trouble after losing its director and one of its stars months into production. According to Deadline, Johan Renck, who was set to helm the first two episodes of HBO Max's prequel, has left the show, and production is on hold amid the search for his replacement. Shirley Henderson, who was supposed to play one of the leads, has also departed. This behind-the-scenes drama comes after creator Diane Ademu-John left as co-showrunner a few months ago. Production on the show, which began in November, is now reportedly being pushed by seven months so the scripts can be reworked, and the delay is "wreaking havoc on actors' schedules," which could lead to further departures, Deadline says. Much has been made of the similarities between Star Wars and Dune, though, so perhaps it's only appropriate that the franchise would follow in the grand Star Wars tradition of abruptly losing directors.
Even (or especially) if you haven’t watched any of the movies. Photo: Universal Pictures
With the 2023 Academy Awards bearing down on us, it’s finally time to let this year’s film debates boil over. Is Everything Everywhere All at Once the zeitgeist movie of the year, or overstuffed multiverse nonsense? Did Steven Spielberg deliver on his career-capping memoir? What do we really owe Brendan Fraser? Is Lydia Tár real? Is Andrea Riseborough? If you’re finding it difficult to answer these questions yet yearn to be a part of the annual ritual anyway, here’s a helpful guide to talking about the 2023 Oscars, even (or especially) if you haven’t watched any of the movies.
The Banshees of Inisherin premiered at the Venice Film Festival in the fall of 2022 with a low rumble of anticipation due to the reunion of director Martin McDonagh and his In Bruges stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. Critics and audiences were big fans, and it entered the Oscar race as an unlikely crowd-pleaser, considering it’s a small story about a longtime friendship gone so suddenly sour that one half of the pair cuts off his own fingers to avoid ever talking to the other again. That is, until McDonagh — whose parents are Irish but who himself grew up in London — got called out for fumbling Irish tropes, reminding us that this is the same man who fumbled American tropes in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
Nothing as ubiquitous as the MCU can ever be truly cool, which put the concept of the multiverse on shaky footing in 2022. Leave it to the Daniels (directors Kwan and Scheinert, whose previous film starred Daniel Radcliffe as a poseable corpse) and the studio that scored Academy love for Moonlight,Lady Bird, and Minari to not only make the multiverse stylish but also prestigious enough to earn 11 Oscar nominations. The movie had its share of naysayers when it premiered in limited theatrical release back in March of 2022 — Peter Bradshaw at The Guardiancalled it “nothing nowhere over a long period of time.” But for every single weary detractor, there is a chorus of admirers eager to take a fanny pack to the skull from Ke Huy Quan or Michelle Yeoh.
Steven Spielberg has directed more Best Picture nominees than almost any filmmaker in history (he is tied with William Wyler at 13), but he’s only ever won the top prize once, for 1993’s Schindler’s List. What was it going to take to get Spielberg a second Best Picture Oscar? The answer, many thought, would be his most autobiographical film to date, the story of aspiring auteur Sammy Fabelman. But a treacly trailer, nagging discussions over whether the film’s cast was sufficiently Jewish, and a growing perception that prestige directors making movies about their own mythologized childhoods was becoming a trope managed to dampen things. And so here we are, with Spielberg’s sixth Best Picture nomination in 12 years, with a movie that drills to the core of his deepest family secrets and the motivations that have driven him as a filmmaker over his career … and he’s probably going to lose again.
No one cares about the theatrical moviegoing experience more than Tom Cruise. He made as much clear when he braved pandemic conditions to see Tenet in August of 2020, and when he flipped out on the crew making Mission: Impossible 7 for breaking COVID protocols, and when he took time away from jumping out of airplanes to thank fans for making Top Gun: Maverick the massive $1.5 billion hit it’s become. “You saved Hollywood’s ass,” Spielberg himself admitted. And now Top Gun: Maverick is a Best Picture nominee. It’s is the kind of anxiety-free, mythology-light, endorphin-rush that has everyone tossing their hands triumphantly in the air and making a silent pact to not think too hard about it. Which is probably why gripes about the movie being pro-military propaganda fell by the wayside over the summer while Lady Gaga closed every one of her tour dates with her Oscar-nominated anthem “Hold My Hand.”
The Oscars love a comeback — especially when it makes Hollywood seem more penitent than it really is — and Fraser’s could be seen coming from a mile away when he was cast in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, playing an obese gay man on the verge of eating himself to death. When the movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival, Fraser received a warm standing ovation that moved him to tears, but reviews for the film itself seemed to get worse and worse from there. Critics called The Whale “overwrought,” “garrishly grim,” and “ghastly” and slammed it for displaying its main character as a brutalized cautionary tale, and awards observers began to question the necessity of a Brendan Fraser Oscar triumph. How much must we give the actor who gave us George of the Jungle and Dudley Do Right?
Every few years, the Oscars deliver a procedural scandal that helps fuel industry gossip and burnish the legend of the Academy Awards as top-notch political theater. This year, that “honor” went to Andrea Riseborough, whose surprise Best Actress nomination for the little-seen indie film To Leslie was so shocking that it led to an internal Academy investigation. Riseborough is talented, but was it kosher for Mary McCormack, wife of To Leslie director Michael Morris, to phone-tree half of the acting branch in order to secure Riseborough’s nomination? Did such a campaign unfairly disadvantage Viola Davis and Danielle Deadwyler, the two Black actresses who were predicted for nominations and then snubbed? Riseborough was quickly cast into the role of usurper. Which is too bad, because in the film, she delivers an affecting portrayal of a woman whose alcoholism has cost her everything and who’s fighting to get her way back.
After a 13-year absence, James Cameron returned to Pandora and 2010-era debates came roaring back: Does the VFX spectacle of Avatar: The Way of Water justify the lackluster story and threadbare characterization? Like its predecessor, it was subject to boycotts and criticism for the way Cameron depicts his imaginary Indigenous tribes, though many are still celebrating him for making good on his claims that he would achieve billion-dollar box-office grandeur.
More often than not, movies that claim the “consensus critical-Establishment favorite” slot at the Oscars tend to inspire conversations about directorial prowess, bold cinematic vision, and weighty themes. All of that was true of Tár, Todd Field’s long-awaited third feature. But then Tár became the surprise meme queen of this year’s Oscars race. Mistaking Lydia Tár for a real person (or pretending to) has been this year’s favorite parlor game, not to mention a tribute to Cate Blanchett’s ability to flesh out her character so well it seems impossible she isn’t real. Certainly debating which projects Lydia Tár won her EGOT for was far a preferable leisure time activity to the increasingly tedious debates over whether the film did or did not approve of Cancel Culture.
This time last year, one film being eyed for future Oscars success was Babylon. It’s got La La Land director Damien Chazelle, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and a story about 1920s Hollywood as dream factory. It’s also got bodily fluids, moral depravity, and orgies — and critics recoiled. In the end, those critics might have been the only people to see Babylon because the movie was a massive flop that tolled another death knell for big artistic swings at the theater, which is what is giving Babylon a bit of a “misunderstood masterpiece” bounce back now.
Netflix has produced a whopping seven Best Picture nominees over the past four years, establishing itself as a major Oscars player. Yet its 2022 slate was woefully short on real contenders. Just when it seemed the streamer would have to retreat for a year, buzz began to coalesce around director Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front, a German-language adaptation of the 1929 novel about World War I. It premiered to almost zero fanfare at the Toronto International Film Festival and dropped on Netflix silently. Not until the Academy released the finalists in selected crafts categories did anybody consider that Netflix might have a contender after all.
This may be the latest case of the Academy’s ongoing infatuation with actors playing real people and getting the impersonation “right”: Some think Butler could win Best Actor for playing Elvis Presley so deep it seemingly broke his real-life vocal patterns. (He’s trying to get rid of it!) Meanwhile, Best Supporting Actress is probably going to Bassett for her portrayal of Queen Ramonda in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever — the first performer to be nominated for a role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If she wins, it will be less about the MCU and more about how she’s Angela Bassett, a beloved star who somehow doesn’t already have an Oscar.
