| Everything we can't stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture.
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Everything we can't stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture.
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Flipping out about Lady Gaga at Céline Dion at the Olympics. Should Maya Rudolph play Kamala Harris on SNL? Are the Veep comparisons a good thing? The energy I want to channel in life. A new all-time great J.Lo video just dropped.
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Céline Made It Through the Rain |
A great Olympics Opening Ceremony should be a profound, stirring celebration of a country's history and culture. It should also be absolutely batshit. On thost metrics, I would consider Friday's kickoff to the Paris games a rousing success. The spectacle was, from my perspective, very French: I didn't understand most of what was going on, but kept being aggressively told it was all very cool and so I convinced myself that I loved it. I could never have—even on my most potent cocktail of melatonin, weed gummy, and white wine—dreamed up the orgy of music, dance styles, and energetic skipping through the streets of Paris that made up the eclectic ceremony.
The can-can! Parkour! A queer ménage à trois in a library! Les Misérables! A nonbinary masked individual riding a horse. A choir of beheaded Marie Antoinette's singing in windows while a heavy metal plays and fire rages. An Olympic torch that resembled a giant blunt, or maybe a flaming baguette. A hot air balloon cauldron that looked like it was about to float on over to Oz. The Minions???
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But the twin highlights of the affair seemed incepted from my dreams entirely: rousing performances by Lady Gaga and Céline Dion, in her triumphant return to singing on a major stage after battling a rare autoimmune neurological disorder. Dion was a reward for anyone who sat through four hours of a decidedly French, wildly bonkers fantasia. After watching thousands and thousands of athletes being dragged through the Seine looking like drowned rats while skateboarders dressed as clowns did tricks in the background, there she was. In a blissfully dramatic fashion befitting Dion's stage persona, first you heard her voice, a gold-medal belt that hasn't been projected with that force publicly in years. I got instant chills. Then the camera zoomed in on the Eiffel Tour, dazzling with twinkling lights, to reveal Dion on a makeshift stage floating in the middle of the landmark. |
She looked positively regal in a beaded, sparkling white evening gown, her hair pulled back into a bun. She gesticulated muscularly while she hit each note. With two speakers flanking her, the image immediately evoked Eva Peron on her balcony—or, if you're gay like me, Patti LuPone singing "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" in Evita. During an instrumental break, she gazed out at the City of Lights before her, from her ascendant position in one of the world's most iconic landmarks. Tears welled in her eyes, echoing the raindrops splashing on the piano beside her. I can't imagine what it must have felt like for her to make a comeback in such a monumental way: not just a return to the stage, but a return to a stage on the Eiffel Tower with the world watching at the Olympics Opening Ceremony. "I actually can't talk," announcer Kelly Clarkson said after the performance, clearly through her own tears. "To have that moment. She's a vocal athlete. She's incredible. It was an emotional finale that elevated a weird day of tons of rain, unusual performances, and, in true Olympic fashion, irresistible moments of inspiration and talent. Earlier in the ceremony, what seems a lifetime ago at this point, Lady Gaga was a surprise performer—in that she was not on the official media guide, and yet everyone in the world knew that she was performing by the time she descended those stairs. She opened the show doing what I can assume is a French translation of Seussical, shaking a feathered tail with plumes shooting out of her hair and serving Mayzie LaBird realness. If you don't understand that reference, I'm both sorry that you have a blindspot for an underrated piece of musical theater culture—and also that you probably couldn't appreciate just how unabashedly gay so much of the ceremony was. (I mean…there was a choreographed dance of giant Louis Vuitton trunks.) |
Gaga nailed every shimmy and shake, clearly having the time of her life belting out the French classic "Mon Truc en Plumes," which translates to "My Thing With Feathers." Is it strange that the Paris Olympics chose an Italian American pop star to open their show? Or is it brilliant? The MVP of any televised ceremony is always going to be Lady Gaga. (Plus, she sang some of "La Vie en Rose" in A Star Is Born, which makes her canonically French in my world.) |
Watching the Opening Ceremony was, as always, a surreal experience: the horny thrill every time they showed Emmanuel Macron; the desire to call the head of every TV network immediately and beg them to have Kelly Clarkson offer running commentary to every live event. I laughed along to Gaga's cheekiness. I stared bewildered at 90 percent of the dance routines. I cried as Céline sang. I feared for the competitors' safety: One thing every athlete should do on the eve of the biggest physical contest of their lives is take a three hour evening boat ride in the pouring rain. I learned that you can, apparently, get seasick from watching boats bob up and down on TV. And, most importantly, I got stoked for the next two weeks of making the Olympics my entire personality. |
Maya Rudolph Could Be Very Busy This Fall |
You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? Or do you exist in the context of desperately wanting Maya Rudolph to revive her performance as Kamala Harris on the next season of Saturday Night Live?
Mere minutes after Joe Biden announced that he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race and that Harris would be leading the Democratic ticket, the internet lit on fire with SNL fans begging for Harris to return for the sketch show's 50th season.
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It's an understandable impulse: Rudolph's take on Harris when she first played her in 2019 was so good that she won an Emmy Award for it in the Guest Actress in a Comedy Series category. Plus, Harris is on record as being fan: |
But is it feasible for a star like Rudolph, who left the show as a fulltime cast member 17 years ago, to take this on? (Believe me, I screamed when I discovered that much time has passed.) She's obviously returned to Studio 8H on a fairly regular basis since then, and is nominated for two more Emmys for her hosting stint this past season. But Rudolph is also pretty damn busy: Those are two of her four nods across three different shows. It's not unprecedented for major celebs to make repeat trips to SNL to play political figures. Tina Fey as Sarah Palin is the major example. Larry David also appeared multiple times as Bernie Sanders. But it's a whole other workload when the politician being spoofed is doing a full presidential campaign—and then possibly being elected to the Oval Office. When Rudolph first played Harris, it was Jim Carrey playing her running mate, Biden. Carrey's been replaced by three different SNL cast members since. So I offer a similar solution: Have Rudolph come back for the big, splashy opening to Season 50 that we all crave—and then have her hand over the wig and cackling laugh to a regular player. I know just the performer, too. It's high time Ego Nwodim got the spotlight her talent deserves on the show. A starring role as Harris is the perfect opportunity for just that. |
Is This Being "Just Like Veep" a Good Thing?
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Ever since the calls for Biden to bow out of the race began and it looked like Harris would take over, I began rewatching Veep. Reaallll original, I know. About a dozen people I know are doing the same thing—and so are, apparently, the rest of you. Viewership of the show surged over 300 percent this week, according to HBO.
The similarities between what's happening in real life and what occurred on the show more than five years ago are eerie. Watching those events play out with Julia Louis-Dreyfus giving perhaps the funniest performance of my lifetime has been wild: alternatively cathartic and disturbing.
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Veep was a series about how extreme of a demented, dysfunctional circus the government—particularly the White House—was in the show's fictional world. It's easy to laugh at those scenes because the show was so brilliant. But it also feels strange: This isn't a sharply written comedy script we're living through. It's unprecedented history. Original Veep creator Armando Iannucci addressed this very thing in a new column for The New York Times. His take: The similarities are not that funny. "This is the first time I'm setting out a definitive answer to that question, and the answer is: No, I'm not," he wrote. "I'm extremely worried! Not about Ms. Harris. I'm sure she'll inject much-needed sharpness into the campaign. What worries me is that politics has become so much like entertainment that the first thing we do to make sense of the moment is to test it against a sitcom." |
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One of the Best Things I've Ever Heard |
Before her death at age 53, actress Shannen Doherty made some arrangements for her funeral—including making a list of people she did not want to be there. |
Here's what she said on her Let's Be Clear podcast in January: "There's a lot of people that I think would show up that I don't want there. I don't want them there because their reasons for showing up aren't necessarily the best reasons. Like, they don't really like me and, you know, they have their reasons and good for them, but they don't actually really like me enough to show up to my funeral…[They'll show up] because it's the politically correct thing to do, and they don't want to look bad, so I kinda want to take the pressure off them and I want my funeral to be like a love fest. I don't want people to be crying or people to privately be like, 'Thank God that bitch is dead now.'" This is precisely the energy I need to channel more of in my life. I will be making my list promptly. |
If you need me at all this weekend, I will unfortunately be busy spending 48 hours watching this video of Jennifer Lopez and her vocal director on a constant loop. They're singing the Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland duet "Get Happy/Happy Days Are Here Again," and no, I will not be expressing an opinion about it. It's still too raw.
Watch here:
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More From The Daily Beast's Obsessed |
- Has RuPaul's Drag Race gotten too…nice? Read more.
- The star of the summer is Glen Powell's dog, Brisket. Read more.
- Evil star Christine Lahti breaks down playing the Antichrist's grandmother (?!?!). Read more.
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