George clooney

Well, One Battle After Another is the toast of the Golden Globe nominations and Wicked: For Good is… not. That’s the biggest immediate takeaway of the first indicator as to how the awards race next year is likely to pan out. The many nuances and surprises of Monday's announcement are not only a fascinating insight into the state of Hollywood in 2025, but also a reminder that the Globes have always prized big star names above everything else – including, perhaps, the worthiness of their inclusion.

So, in the end, it wasn’t so much Oh, Mary! as it was Not Tonight, Mary! Cole Escola’s out-there, queer-as-they-come farce, revolving around the strained relationship between the “foul and hateful” Mary Lincoln, a dipsomaniac with ambitions to be a cabaret singer, and honest Abe, here presented as a pitiful figure so deep in the closet he may as well be in Narnia, was widely regarded as the play to beat at this year’s Tonys. There hasn’t been an out-and-out comedy that’s won the major awards for a considerable time, let alone one that emerged from off-Broadway, and it’s testament to Escola’s prowess (as well as some of the most laudatory reviews in recent memory), that it was front-runner for Best Play.

George Clooney isn’t afraid to politic. And last July he showed himself willing to speak truth to his own party’s power: by voicing the dramatic decline in Biden’s facilities in a New York Times op-ed, Clooney, a lifelong Democrat, helped force ole’ Joe out the race. Is it any surprise, then, that Clooney has chosen to make a splash on Broadway in a play that is explicitly political? Clooney’s resurrection of his critically acclaimed 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck for the stage is timed for maximum impact. Good Night, and Good Luck dramatizes Edward R. Murrow’s historic takedowns of Joseph McCarthy on his beloved CBS show See It Now.

After a paralyzing 118 days, the actors’ strike is now, finally, looking like it’s over, following hard in the footsteps of the similarly resolved WGA strike a couple of weeks ago. The SAG are claiming victory over the studios, who took an exceptionally long time to ratify demands that included everything from increased fees for work appearing on streaming services, to protections regarding the use of AI, to reproduce actors’ images on screen. There were many times during the strike when it looked as if both sides were simply too far apart to achieve a resolution. In the end, money talks: the major Hollywood studios and streaming services realized that without the swift agreement they needed, there would be a drought of product in the marketplace next year, and beyond.

Why did Bros bomb? The paltry $4.8 million opening weekend of the “first gay romantic comedy from a major studio featuring an entirely LGBTQ principal cast” — quite the mouthful — was as predictable as its fawning critical response (88 percent on Rotten Tomatoes). The film also cost $22 million to produce, not including its marketing budget, which somehow failed to publicize the fact that this is a rom-com from Judd Apatow. When the film’s lead, Billy Eichner, announced that Bros flopped because straight people “just didn’t show up,” he was right — but it wasn’t just straight men; it was women who seemed as excited for Bros as they were the next sweaty and dim Rambo movie. Also, who titled this film? What was the logic?

There has never been a sitcom as successful as Friends. Between 1994 and 2004, it was watched by 25 million people a week in the US. Seventeen years after the final episode aired, Friends was still the fourth most watched show in the world. So it’s no surprise that the new Friends: The Reunion is a big deal. One of my friends, a fellow super fan, told me she drank a bottle of wine before watching it and recommended I do the same. I lack self-control so drank two, passed out, and then had to face the 94-minute special sober and hungover. It was unclear what the reunion set out to be. An extended interview with the cast? A documentary about the show’s origins? An hour in and it still wasn’t clear.