Skip to main content

MTV VMAs 2019: Taylor Swift, Lil Nas X win big, but Missy Elliott is the star

Ceremony looks backward with its host but forward in its music, with Spanish performances, space gear, and a crowd-rousing tribute to Elliott

The 2019 VMAs often didn’t seem to know what year it was – a mix of dad jokes, Latin music, double-denim outfits and one performance set in 2079, in a ceremony that mostly lacked the typical controversy. With awards split between longtime pop dominator Taylor Swift and the very 2019 star Lil Nas X, it was perhaps fitting that the night’s top honor celebrated the genre- and era-defying musical work of Missy Elliott.

Swift opened the show with two singles from her new album Lover: the technicolor trailer park-themed You Need To Calm Down, and return-to-form acoustic track Lover. The colorful performance kicked off a big night for Swift, who took home Video of the Year for You Need To Calm Down: a song pitched as an LGBTQ anthem for Pride Month. In her acceptance speech, she pointed to the Equality Act, for which the video solicited petitions. “By voting for this video, you showed that you want a world where everyone is treated equally,” she said. Swift also took home the trophy for the “Video for Good” category.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2KXSTag

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...