Guilty Pleasures
By Associated Press
Swift leads 2024 MTV Video Music Awards nominations, followed by Post Malone
NEW YORK | It’s Taylor Swift’s world, and the MTV Video Music Award nominations are the latest proof.
“The Tortured Poets Department” singer once again tops the VMA noms with 10 — eight for her “Fortnight” music video and nods in the artist of the year and best pop categories. She’s followed by her “Fortnight” collaborator Post Malone, who is nominated along with Swift eight times and earned his ninth nom for his country hit “I Had Some Help,” featuring Morgan Wallen.
Rounding out the artist of the year category nominees announced Tuesday are Ariana Grande, Bad Bunny, Eminem, Sabrina Carpenter and SZA.
Swift took home nine VMAs last year, bringing her total to an impressive 23. That places her just behind Beyoncé, who has 28 (two with Destiny’s Child) and just ahead of Madonna, who has 20 awards, and Lady Gaga, who has 19.
The 2024 MTV VMAs will air live on Sept. 10 at 8 p.m. Eastern.
Grande, Carpenter and Eminem are tied with six nods; Megan Thee Stallion and SZA have five each. Blackpink’s LISA, Olivia Rodrigo and Teddy Swims follow with four nominations.
This year marks 29 first-time nominees, which include Wallen, Carpenter and Swims as well as Benson Boone and Tyla — the latter boast three nominations each.
Also nominated for the first time in 2024 are Chappell Roan, Coco Jones, Gracie Abrams, Jelly Roll, Jessie Murph, LE SSERAFIM, Morgan Wallen, Rauw Alejandro, RAYE, Sexyy Red, Shaboozey, Tyla, Tyler Childers, Victoria Monet and more.
The VMAs will be held at the UBS Arena on New York’s Long Island. Fan voting begins online Tuesday across 15 gender-neutral categories and ends Aug. 30.
Voting in the best new artist category will remain active throughout the show.
From cookbooks to billboards, poets laureate hope to spread the words with help of
$50,000 grants
NEW YORK | Twenty-two poets around the country each will be receiving $50,000 grants for projects ranging from a poetry cookbook in Kansas to a billboard campaign in Michigan.
On Tuesday, the Academy of American Poets announced its latest round of gifts through the Poet Laureate Fellowship Program, through which it has given out $6.55 million since 2019, along with more than $440,000 in matching grants.
Among this year’s Fellows are: Michigan laureate Nandi Comer, whose billboard project includes excerpts from Michigan poets and a QR code directing readers to the Library of Michigan’s website; Kansas laureate Traci Brimhall, who hopes to bring chefs and poets together for a state community cookbook; and Angelika Brewer, poet laureate of Ogden, Utah, who is working on a local archive.
Other Fellows include Maine laureate Julia Bouwsma, Colorado laureate Andrea Gibson and Joseph Rios, laureate of Fresno, California.
The fellowship program was made possible by the Mellon Foundation.
“These exceptional writers share the distinctive responsibility of advancing action, advocacy, and civic transformation in their communities through the power of poetry,” said Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander. “We at Mellon are pleased to provide them with the additional resources needed to carry out this mission, building further appreciation of and engagement with the written word across the United States.”
New York Film Festival sets main slate with movies
by Almodóvar,
Baker and Diop
NEW YORK | The New York Film Festival on Tuesday unveiled the main slate for its 62nd edition, with selections including Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning “Anora,” Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” and Mati Diop’s “Dahomey.”
Thirty-three features will make up the central lineup of the annual festival presented by Film at Lincoln Center. The main slate is particularly international this year, with films hailing from 24 countries, and including 19 directors making their debut in the festival’s most prestigious section.
The festival, as previously announced, will kick off Sept. 27 with RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys,” an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel. Almodóvar, making his 15th appearance in New York’s main slate, will present “The Room Next Door,” starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, as the festival centerpiece. Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” about the bombing of London in World War II, will be the closing night film.
A number of prize-winners from May’s Cannes Film Festival will be making their U.S. or North American premieres. Along with “Anora,” that includes “Grand Tour,” by Miguel Gomes, winner of Cannes’ best director; Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light,” winner of the Grand Prix; Rungano Nyoni’s “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” a standout from Un Certain Regard; and “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” from the dissident Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof who fled his home country to unveil his film.
“The festival’s ambition is to reflect the state of cinema in a given year, which often means also reflecting the state of the world,” said Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director, in a statement. “The most notable thing about the films in the main slate — and in the other sections that we will announce in the coming weeks — is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality. They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in, and reimagine the world.”
Also are tap are Paul Schrader’s “Oh, Canada,” with Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi, Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides” and David Cronenberg’s “The Shrouds,” as well as a pair of highlights from Cannes sidebars: Roberto Minervini’s American Civil War drama “The Damned” and Carson Lund’s baseball elegy “Eephus.”
Also coming to New York: Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths,” Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” starring Adrien Brody as an architect and Holocaust survivor, and the world premiere of Julia Loktev’s “My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow,” a documentary about independent journalism in Putin’s Russia.
Two filmmakers have a pair of films in the main slate. Both “By the Stream” and “A Traveler’s Needs” from the South Korean director Hong Sangsoo will debut at the festival, while the Chinese documentarian Wang Bing will present the second and third entries in his “Youth” trilogy: “Youth (Hard Times”) and “Youth (“Homecoming”).
The New York Film Festival, running Sept. 27 to Oct. 14, takes place at Lincoln Center and a handful of other venues around the city.
—From AP reports
