Hollywood’s biggest night is finally here — and the stars did not hold back when it came time to bring the fashion to the red carpet at the 2024 Academy Awards on Sunday night. From statement gowns to the classic and dapper, this year’s group of nominees closed out the 2024 awards season with a (rather stunning) bang. Follow us all night for the best Oscar-worthy looks.
Eddie Egan, a very real marketing consultant, lost his gig with Lionsgate this week after the studio discovered that quotes he used in a trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis were fabricated, according to Variety.
The conceit behind the teaser, which Lionsgate recalled on Wednesday, was that critics had trashed Coppola’s masterpieces throughout the decades, so why trust them? Except that the critics quoted didn’t actually write any of the pith. A quote attributed to Pauline Kael that was said to have run in The New Yorker, claiming The Godfather was “diminished by its artsiness,” never ran.
It’s likely that the consultant used A.I. to generate information, a source familiar with the matter told Rolling Stone, who adds it was never the studio’s intention to fabricate quotes and said that when the studio realized there was a problem, it reacted immediately and apologized.
Variety reports that a prompt to ChatGPT for negative press around Coppola returned similar statements but that in reality Kael loved The Godfather.
Egan did not return Rolling Stone’s request for comment. Neither did a rep for Lionsgate.
Egan has been an independent contractor since parting ways with STX film group in 2019. While at STX and previously at Universal, Variety reports, that he worked closely with Adam Fogelson, who’s now Lionsgate’s film group chairperson.
“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis,” the company said in a statement Wednesday. “We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry.”
Coppola’s Roman epic Megalopolis, which stars Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, and Nathalie Emmanuel, is set to come out Sept. 27.
Rolling Stone’s bona fide film critic, David Fear (also a real name), praised the movie when it premiered at Cannes. The following quote is verifiable, and you can fact-check it.
“Say what you will about this grand gesture at filtering Edward Gibbon’s history lessons through a lens darkly, it is exactly the movie that Coppola set out to make — uncompromising, uniquely intellectual, unabashedly romantic (upper-case and lower-case R), broadly satirical yet remarkably sincere about wanting not just brave new worlds but better ones,” Fear wrote. “Does it sometimes feel as if it’s distilling decades’ worth of book-club readings and coffee-klatch conversations into a tightly packed two hours? Yes. Was it worth the wait? Dear god, yes.” (Fear’s choice of Roman font, pun intended, and italics are also very real.)
The numbers are in, and the viewership of the Democratic National Convention blew last month’s Republican National Convention out of the water.
Early numbers by Nielsen Fast Nationals indicate that the final night of the DNC garnered 26.20 million viewers across 15 networks, compared to night four of the 2024 RNC Night 4 at 25.4 million viewers.
The DNC drew in more viewers across 12 different cable and broadcasting news networks all four nights of the convention. 20 million on Monday, 20.6 million viewers on Tuesday, 20.2 million on Wednesday, and the estimated 26.20 on Thursday.
By contrast, the RNC drew in 18.1 million, 14.8 million, 18 million, and 25.4 million viewers on each of its respective four nights.
These numbers don’t even factor in the hundreds of thousands who viewed the convention on independent streaming services like YouTube, Twitch, and other social media platforms.
During Vice President Kamala Harris’s nomination speech on Thursday her opponent, former President Donald Trump, spiraled into a multi-platform meltdown that continued into Friday.
One factor driving the former president’s unraveling might be his concerns that more people are paying more attention to Harris than to him. As previously reported by Rolling Stone, days before the convention even began, Trump was badgering his media and political allies for reassurance that the DNC would have fewer viewers than his own convention.
From ratings to crowd sizes, the former reality TV star has harbored a longtime obsession with quantifying how much people like him — a fixation that Democrats made a point to poke fun of during the convention.
On Tuesday, Former President Barack Obama — who Trump famously, and falsely, claimed had a smaller inauguration crowd than him — mocked his successor’s obsession with size as a sign he was that he was compensating for … other deficiencies. The viewership of the DNC isn’t the only metric through which Harris is trouncing Trump. According to July’s fundraising numbers, the Harris campaign more than quadrupled the former president’s cash haul last month — a staggering $204 million compared to Trump’s $48 million.
One of the odder features of American journalism is that the columnists who hold themselves out as “fact checkers” and review claims made by politicians — calling balls, strikes, and “pinocchios” — are unusually terrible at it.
Fact checkers offered up several botched reviews of content from the Democratic National Convention, but nothing has broken their brains like Democrats’ sustained attacks on Donald Trump over Republicans’ anti-abortion agenda, which is laid out in gory detail in conservatives’ Project 2025 policy roadmap.
The former president has actively attempted to run away from Project 2025, because the policy goals laid out in the 887-page blueprint are deeply unpopular. Trump has claimed, “I know nothing about Project 2025, [and] I have no idea who is behind it.” On Thursday, he again claimed to “HAVE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH” it.
It’s an absurd claim: The policy manual was written in large part by former top Trump administration officials — and when he spoke at a 2022 event hosted by the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, Trump said: “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”
As Rolling Stone has reported, sources say that Trump has been directly briefed by confidants and close aides on Project 2025’s substance and progress. Top officials involved with the project are expected to have senior roles in a Trump administration.
Instead of fact checking Trump’s clearly false claim that he knows nothing about Project 2025, fact checkers have decided they — and everyone else — must simply take him at his word. Further, Democrats must be punished for tying Trump to its unpopular policy proposals.
The Poynter Institute’s Politifact already beclowned itself earlier in the week by declaring it was unfair of the DNC to broadcast a video of Trump from 2016 saying “there has to be some form of punishment” for people who have abortions, because he “walked back the comment.”
On Thursday, Politifact’s staff reviewed Vice President Kamala Harris’ claim that Trump “plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.”
Politifact deemed Harris’ claim “mostly false” because Project 2025 “isn’t Trump’s plan,” adding that “Trump and his campaign have repeatedly said they were not involved in the project and Trump is not listed as an author, editor, or contributor.”
It’s hard to say how inappropriate this is, but things quickly got worse.
“Project 2025 doesn’t mention a ‘national anti-abortion coordinator.’ The document calls for a ‘pro-life politically appointed Senior Coordinator of the Office of Women, Children, and Families,’” Politifact wrote. “It says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s abortion surveillance and maternal mortality reporting systems are inadequate and proposes withholding federal money from states that don’t report to the CDC how many abortions take place in their states.”
These are virtually the same things.
The article also pans Harris’ supposedly “predictive” claim that Trump wants to “enact a nationwide abortion ban,” noting that “Trump said this year he would not sign a national ban.” This is true — but shortly before the former president announced that abortion should be a state issue, he openly mulled endorsing a national abortion ban.
It’s obviously worth considering, too, that Trump appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices whose votes were essential to overturning Roe v. Wade, allowing states to ban abortion — an accomplishment he openly brags about.
Politifact concludes that Harris “exaggerates Trump’s abortion agenda by tying him to Project 2025 ‘allies.’”
Is it really a journalist’s job to declare with certainty that the issue position Trump has settled on, as a matter of politics, is exactly what he would do as president? Absolutely not. It’s even more irresponsible coming from pundits holding themselves out as “fact checkers.”
If that is indeed their job, they should throw in the towel.
A federal judge in Kentucky ruled that two police officers accused of falsifying a warrant ahead of the deadly raid that killed Breonna Taylor were not responsible for her death, The Associated Press reports. And rather than the phony warrant, U.S. District Judge Charles Simpson said Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, was responsible for her death because he fired upon the police officers first — even though he had no idea they were police officers.
The ruling was handed down earlier this week in the civil rights violation case against former Louisville Police Detective Joshua Jaynes and former Sgt. Kyle Meany. The two were not present at the March 2020 raid when Taylor was killed. Instead, in 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland accused the pair (along with another detective, Kelly Goodlett) of submitting a false affidavit to search Taylor’s home before the raid and then conspiring to create a “false cover story… to escape responsibility” for preparing the phony warrant.
Prosecutors had argued that this phony warrant put Taylor in danger. But Simpson dismissed the claim that armed officers conducting a middle-of-the-night raid on a no-knock warrant based on made-up intel that a suspected drug dealer was receiving packages at Taylor’s apartment had anything to do with her eventually being shot and killed. “There is no direct link between the warrantless entry and Taylor’s death,” Simpson wrote.
Instead, he argued that Walker was far more responsible. When the police barged into Taylor’s apartment, Walker fired a shot, thinking the police were intruders and hit a cop in the leg. In response, the police fired over 30 shots inside the apartment, with five or six striking Taylor.
Simpson decided that Walker’s “conduct became the proximate, or legal, cause of Taylor’s death.” (Walker was briefly arrested and charged with attempted murder of a police officer, but that charge was dropped. In 2022, he settled a $2 million civil suit with the city, accusing the cops of violating his civil rights by not announcing themselves upon executing the raid.)
“While the indictment alleges that Jaynes and Meany set off a series of events that ended in Taylor’s death, it also alleges that Walker disrupted those events when he decided to open fire,” Simpson said.
In a statement, Taylor’s family told The AP they were “devastated” by the ruling and were still “trying to process” the decision. “The only thing we can do at this point is continue to be patient … we will continue to fight until we get full justice for Breonna Taylor,” they said.
Taylor’s family also said prosecutors told them they planned to appeal the decision. The Justice Department said it “is reviewing the judge’s decision and assessing next steps.”
For now, Simpson’s ruling has hobbled the DOJ’s civil rights violation case against Jaynes and Meany, reducing the charges to misdemeanors. Jaynes is still facing a conspiracy charge, while Meany is accused of making false statements to investigators. Goodlett previously pleaded guilty to the charges against him and is expected to testify against the others.
Queens of the Stone Age have canceled the remainder of their 2024 tour dates — including a string of North American shows and festival gigs scheduled for the fall — as Josh Homme continues his recovery from an unspecified surgery he underwent in July.
“QOTSA regret to announce the cancellation and/or postponement of all remaining 2024 shows. Josh has been given no choice but to prioritize his health and to receive essential medical care through the remainder of the year,” the band wrote on social media.
The group was scheduled to perform eight North American shows this autumn, starting with a two-night stand at Boston’s MGM Music Hall on September 27 and 28. All five of the band’s standalone shows — including concerts in Boston, Cincinnati, Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin — will all be pushed to to-be-announced dates in 2025, while QOTSA had to cancel their festival appearances at Bridgeport’s Soundside, Memphis’ Mempho, and Mexico City’s Corona Capital.
In July, Queens of the Stone Age abruptly canceled their European tour after Homme had to return stateside “immediately for emergency surgery,” the band said in a statement. “Due to continued medical care, it is under doctors’ orders that Josh Homme remain in their care in the United States.”
At that time, QOTSA’s North American shows remained on the schedule before they were ultimately nixed on Friday. “Josh and the QOTSA family are so thankful for your support and the time we were able to spend together over the last year. Hope to see you all again in 2025,” the band added Friday.
The group were touring in support of their latest album, In Times New Roman …, which came out in 2023, the same year that Homme revealed that he’d previously undergone surgery to remove cancer.
