Kara Swisher on All the Nonsense in the Tech Industry
Horny Texans saw a very unsexy message when visiting the previously mentioned porn sites on Thursday.
“As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website,” the message reads. “Unfortunately, the Texas law for age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Until the real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas.”
Pornhub’s sexy step-sister sites Redtube, Brazzers, and YouPorn are also showing the same message.
Back in February, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Aylo, Pornhub’s parent company, for failing to enforce the state’s age verification law. The legislation went into effect last September and requires adult sites like Pornhub to obtain digital identification for users verifying they are of legal age to view porn. Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled in favor of Texas ruling that the state law doesn’t violate the First Amendment.
Aylo says it’s not finished in its legal battle for the right of every red-blooded adult American to access hardcore porn.
“This is not the end,” said Alex Kekesi, vice president of brand and community for Aylo, in an emailed statement Thursday. “We are reviewing options and consulting with our legal team. We will continue to fight for our industry and the performers that legally earn a living, and we will continue to appeal through all available judicial recourse to recognize that this law is unconstitutional.”
Texas is part of the growing number of states that are finding the largest porn sites are no longer interested in sticking around. Montana and North Carolina saw their access to Pornhub and its sister sites go away at the beginning of the year. Arkansas, Mississippi, Utah, Louisiana, and Virginia have also either lost access or will lose access due to their own age verification laws. The governor of Indiana signed his state’s age verification law on Wednesday.
Peek behind the curtains in a new X-Men ‘97 featurette. Get a look at what’s coming on Halo’s season finale. The Wynonna Earp revival movie has wrapped filming. Plus, meet Inside Out 2‘s new emotions, and Evil Dead Rise’s Lee Cronin is setting up his genre future. To me, my spoilers!
Kara Swisher on All the Nonsense in the Tech Industry
Jurassic World 4
According to a new report from The InSneider newsletter, Universal Pictures has offered Scarlett Johansson the leading role in Jurassic World 4.
The Prisoner
Additionally, Variety suggests Christopher Nolan may follow Oppenheimer with a film adaptation of the 1960’s TV series, The Prisoner—a project the outlet notes the director was formerly “attached to in 2009,” but “the sci-fi project vanished from Nolan’s dance card that same year when AMC released its own The Prisoners, a six-part miniseries led by Jim Caviezel as the ill-fated agent Number Six alongside Ian McKellen and Ruth Wilson.”
Untitled Lee Cronin Projects
THR reports Evil Dead Rise director Lee Cronin “has joined forces with frequent collaborators John Keville and Macdara Kelleher of Wild Atlantic Pictures” to launch Doppelgängers, “a new production outfit focused on genre fare” that’s already signed “a first-look deal with New Line Cinema for its feature film projects.”
Cuckoo
According to Bloody-Disgusting, Tilman Singer’s horror film Cuckoo has been rated “R” for “violence, bloody images, language and brief teen drug use.” Hunter Schafer, Dan Stevens, Jessica Henwick, Marton Csókás, Greta Fernández and Jan Bluthardt star.
Inside Out 2
Disney has released character posters of Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, Disgust, Anxiety, Ennui, Envy and Embarrassment as they appear in Inside Out 2.
Wynonna Earp: Vengeance
Filming has officially wrapped on the Wynonna Earp revival movie, according to series creator Emily Andras on Instagram.
Star Wars products love a theme moment—Force Friday, Triple Force Friday, whatever the Force Friday equivalent for Rogue One was called. Maybe they just love Fridays, but now Lucasfilm and its merch partners are capitalizing on a whole month to sell you things, with a specific villainous twist.
This March is now Imperial March, because, well, duh, and Lucasfilm is planning a bunch of new merchandise announcements with a suitably evil theme. Hasbro is leading the charge with a wave of new figures from Jedi: Fallen Order, Ahsoka, and classic Star Wars across its 6″ and 3.75″ toy lines, and although “Imperial March” will be long done by the time any of them come out, it’s still nice to see what’s in store for the baddies on your shelves this year.
The Jedi: Fallen Order three-pack (featuring the vision of an Inquistor Cal Kestis, the Second Sister, and a Purge Trooper) will release this spring exclusively through Amazon for $75, while the Vintage Collection Captain Enoch and Night Trooper pack ($55), as well as the individual Darth Vader and Stormtrooper releases ($17 each), will be available from Hasbro Pulse and other retailers this summer. Click through to see pictures!
The city of Fukuyama, Japan is on high alert after a cat fell into a vat of toxic chemicals and escaped into the night. Officials warned the animal is covered in hexavalent chromium, and residents should be careful not to touch any “cat that seems abnormal.”
Kara Swisher on All the Nonsense in the Tech Industry
A worker at Nomura Plating factory discovered a set of yellow paw prints leading away from a chemical tank early Monday morning. The cat was later spotted leaving the factory on security footage, according to the newspaper Asahi Shimbun. You can see a video of the ill-fated cat below.
A dip into hexavalent chromium, also known as chromium 6, may be a death sentence no matter how many lives the feline has left. The solution can cause skin irritation, respiratory issues, heart failure, lung cancer, and even death. As the Washington Post points out, it’s the same chemical that leaked into groundwater in the Julia Roberts movie Erin Brockovich.
【六価クロム】まみれのネコ逃走中 「触らないで」 広島・福山市
Fukuyama Environmental Conservation Division reported that the cat may be dead but issued a warning to locals, according to Ahahi Shumbun, “If you find a cat that seems abnormal, please do not touch it and contact the city or police.” Nippon TV News reports that officials are asking elementary schools to keep children away from cats in general.
There’s no update on the cat or its whereabouts as of press time, but the cat would probably be easy to pick out if it’s still on its feet. If the cat is alive that means it probably hasn’t licked itself clean, which means it would probably be stained a yellow or reddish-brown color thanks to the hexavalent chromium. According to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, chromium compounds are widely used for electroplating, stainless steel production, leather tanning, textile manufacturing, and wood preservation.
An 80-year-old man in Montana pleaded guilty Tuesday to two felony wildlife crimes involving his plan to let paying customers hunt sheep on private ranches. But these weren’t just any old sheep. They were “massive hybrid sheep” created by illegally importing animal parts from central Asia, cloning the sheep, and then breeding an enormous hybrid species.
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Arthur “Jack” Schubarth, 80, owns and operates the 215-acre “alternative livestock” ranch in Vaughn, Montana where he started this operation in 2013, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. Alternative livestock includes hybrids of mountain sheep, mountain goats, and other large mammals which are often used for trophy hunting by wealthy people.
An unnamed accomplice of Schubart kicked off the decade-long scheme by illegally bringing biological tissue from a Marco Polo sheep, the largest sheep in the world, from Kyrgyzstan into the U.S. in 2013, according to prosecutors.
How big are these sheep? An average male can weigh over 300 pounds with horns over 5 feet wide, giving them the largest sheep horns on the planet. The sheep are endangered and protected by both international treaties and U.S. law. Montana also forbids the import of these foreign sheep or their parts in an effort to protect local American sheep from disease.
Once Schubart had smuggled his sheep parts into the U.S., he sent them to an unnamed lab which created 165 cloned embryos, according to the DOJ.
“Schubarth then implanted the embryos in ewes on his ranch, resulting in a single, pure genetic male Marco Polo argali that he named ‘Montana Mountain King’ or MMK,” federal authorities wrote in a press release.
By the time Schubart had his Montana Mountain King he used the cloned sheep’s semen to artificially impregnate female sheep, creating hybrid animals. The goal, as the DOJ explains it, was to create these massive new sheep that could then be used for sports hunting on large ranches. Schubart also forged veterinarian inspection certificates to transport the new hybrid sheep under false pretenses, and sometimes even sold semen from his Montana Mountain King to other breeders in the U.S.
Schubart sent 15 artificially inseminated sheep to Minnesota in 2018 and sold 37 straws of Montana Mountain King’s semen to someone in Texas, according to an indictment filed last month. Schubart also offered to sell an offspring of the Montana Mountain King, dubbed the Montana Black Magic, to someone in Texas for $10,000.
Discussions between Schubart and an unnamed person apparently included what to call this new breed of sheep they were creating. The other person said another co-conspirator had suggested the name “Black Argali,” though noting “we can’t,” presumably because it would give away the fact that these sheep were descended from the argali species.
Schubart pleaded guilty to violating the Lacey Act, and conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act, which makes it a crime to acquire, transport or sell wildlife in contravention of federal law.
“This was an audacious scheme to create massive hybrid sheep species to be sold and hunted as trophies,” assistant Attorney General Todd Kim from the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division said in a press release.
“In pursuit of this scheme, Schubarth violated international law and the Lacey Act, both of which protect the viability and health of native populations of animals,” Kim continued.
Schubart conspired with at least five other people who are not named in the indictment. Schubarth faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 and is scheduled to be sentenced by Chief U.S. District Court Judge Brian M. Morris for the District of Montana in July.
When you think of the most important people in Star Trek history, in terms of actors at least you might look to the legacies of people like William Shatner or Patrick Stewart. But the real answer to that question is probably Jonathan Frakes, who has been a part of pretty much all televised Trek since the ‘70s—and when Discovery ends in a few months, it’ll break the trend of his influence, at least in front of the camera.
‘I Saw Jonathan Frakes Giving Patrick Stewart a Noogie’
Since starring as William T. Riker in The Next Generation, Frakes has made a guest appearance in almost every Star Trek series since, either as Riker or a facsimile of him, or his villainous transporter clone brother Thomas (responsible for the greatest fake beard reveal in television history, thanks to Deep Space Nine). Just three series have gone without an on-screen Frakes appearance so far—Discovery, Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds—and now we know at least one of them never will.
When asked by Den of Geek at a recent appearance during SXSW whether or not Frakes would make an on-screen appearance in Discovery’s final season, co-creator and producer Alex Kurtzman offered a very resoundingly flat “No.” It’s not surprising considering that, as Discovery is now so far into Star Trek’s future, Riker is extremely dead at this point. At least it will always have a special connection to Frakes through his role as a similarly consistent Trek director—Frakes has been regularly directing episodes of Discovery since its first season, and will direct the penultimate episode of the show in season five. But it does indeed mean the end to a decades-long trend of making Frakes one of the most consistent Trek actors in the franchise history, and there’s something oddly sad about that.
Prodigy and Strange New Worlds both still have time to have their own Frakes appearances—Prodigy is set in 2385, while Riker was still in active service even after the birth of his son Thaddeus, for whom he would step back from active duty to try and help treat when he was diagnosed with mendaxic neurosclerosis in the run-up to the events of Star Trek: Picard. Strange New Worlds (which like Discovery has a Frakes connection through directing; he shot the show’s fantastic crossover with Lower Decks, “Those Old Scientists”) being pre-original Trek would make a Riker appearance very difficult, but Frakes could still play some role, whether it’s an ancestor or an entirely new character.
We’ll have to wait and see—and behold what Frakes cooks up as his parting gift for Discovery—when season five begins streaming on April 4.
A first-edition iPhone with 4GB of storage would run you about $499 back in 2007, but nowadays they cost around $190,000. An auction house is selling one of these rare iPhones, sealed in its original packaging from 16 years ago, but the last one it sold had a 38,000% markup from its original price.
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“One of the most important and ubiquitous inventions of our lifetime, the iPhone,” said LCG Auctions in its product description.
The auction house will take bids on this Original 2007 iPhone for the next two weeks, first reported by 9to5Mac Monday. It’s the third 4GB model LCG Auctions has ever sold, with the first two selling for $190,000 and $133,000 last year. The current bid on this iPhone is $11,000, as of Tuesday morning, but the auction house estimates this model will go for at least $100,000.
Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone on Jan 9, 2007 at Macworld in San Francisco, noting that Apple was about to “reinvent the phone.” The iPhone quickly became Apple’s best-selling product and was even named Time Magazine’s Invention of the Year. Given the success, it’s strange that the iPhone 4GB was discontinued on Sep 5th, 2007, just two months after its retail release.
The iPhone 4GB was released alongside the iPhone 8GB, priced at $599. For double the storage, most consumers were more than happy to pay the extra $100. So Apple quickly stopped producing the 4GB iPhone and never made a phone with such little storage again. Today, the base iPhone 15 has 128GB and more expensive models have 512GB of storage. The original 4GB iPhone is puny in comparison.
Given that the first edition iPhone 4GB was only sold for two months, despite being so revolutionary, it’s become quite the collector’s item. LCG Auctions notes the box on this specific model has never been opened, and the phone inside has never been activated. The box still has bright colors imbued in 2007, with little signs of fading.
Some lucky collectors will take home this original iPhone, and they may pay a hefty price tag to do so. But it could all be worth it to relive the glory days of Apple.
John Barnett, a former quality control engineer at Boeing who—just last week—testified against the company as part of a whistleblower retaliation lawsuit, has been found dead, the BBC reports.
The M3 MacBook Airs are as Good as Ever, and That’s the Problem
Barnett, 62, who previously worked for Boeing for three decades and retired from the company in 2017, was found at his motel in Charleston, South Carolina on Saturday. The local coroner’s office says Barnett appears to have died as the result of a self-inflicted gunshot.
BBC reports that, in the “days before his death, he had been giving evidence in a whistleblower lawsuit against the company.” Barnett had been scheduled to appear in court again on Saturday for his third day of depositions related to the suit but never showed, the BBC reports. After his failure to appear, a call was put out to look for Barnett. He was subsequently found dead in his truck, which was in the parking lot of the motel he was staying at, the outlet writes.
Gizmodo asked the coroner’s office if an autopsy had been performed on Barnett. While the office didn’t answer that question, it did share the following statement about his death:
The Charleston County Coroner, Bobbi Jo O’Neal, is releasing the name of John Barnett, a 62-year-old male from Louisiana. Mr. Barnett died on March 9, 2024, from what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Charleston City Police Department is the investigating agency. No further details are available at this time.
When reached for comment by Gizmodo, Boeing provided the following statement: “We are saddened by Mr. Barnett’s passing, and our thoughts are with his family and friends.”
Barnett had previously voiced concerns that Boeing employees had attached “substandard parts” to planes and that some of the aircraft had “faulty oxygen systems” that could lead to a significant number of oxygen masks malfunctioning, The Hill writes. A subsequent FAA investigation seemed to substantiate some of Barnett’s claims. The lawsuit that Barnett was involved in at the time of his death was a whistleblower retaliation lawsuit that he had filed against the company. Barnett accused Boeing of pushing him into retirement in response to the safety concerns he raised. Boeing has denied any wrongdoing.
Gizmodo also reached out to an attorney for Barnett but haven’t heard back yet. We will update this story if we do.
The cargo pallet after being tossed by the by the Canadarm2 robotic arm in 2021.Photo: NASA
On Friday, March 8, a pallet of used batteries from the International Space Station (ISS) reentered Earth’s atmosphere over the Gulf of Mexico following an unpredictable journey through orbit.
Taking out the Trash (in Space)
The pallet contained nine batteries and weighed in at 2.9 tons. It had been tossed by the Canadarm2 robotic arm in March 2021 and and has since been tumbling towards Earth in an uncontrolled reentry. The chaotic fall through orbit finally came to an end last week when the cargo pallet reentered on March 8 around 3:29 p.m. ET somewhere above Cancun and Cuba, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who has been tracking the piece of ISS trash.
It’s not clear, however, whether the entire pallet burned up upon reentry through Earth’s atmosphere, or if some parts of it survived the heat. The European Space Agency (ESA) was also monitoring the pallet’s reentry and estimated that some parts may reach the ground but that the likelihood of a person being hit were very low. There have been no reports of injuries or damage since the object returned to Earth.
The pallet is the largest object ever thrown out from the ISS. It was launched to the space station in May 2020 by a Japanese cargo ship to help astronauts replace the old nickel-hydrogen batteries with new, more efficient lithium-ion batteries. These batteries store energy collected by the station’s solar arrays.
It wasn’t meant to end this way for the older batteries, which were supposed to be placed inside a Japanese HTV cargo ship for proper disposal. However, a backlog in the disposal of this type of equipment from the ISS forced NASA to simply toss the batteries inside a cargo pallet using the space station’s robotic arm, which led to their uncontrolled reentry.
The uncontrolled reentry of massive objects such as the battery pallet is fairly uncommon, and most objects that do meet their demise through Earth’s atmosphere usually burn up with no trace left behind. Space agencies commonly accept a 1-in 10,000 probability threshold for the casualty risk of a single uncontrolled reentry, according to ESA. As the space industry continues to grow, it might get trickier to monitor who’s sticking to the rules, which could eventually result in new regulations.
For more spaceflight in your life, follow us on X and bookmark Gizmodo’s dedicated Spaceflight page.
Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales, wants everyone to chill out about the photo of her and her kids, which has caused an international firestorm after being pulled by some of the world’s biggest photo agencies for being “manipulated.” According to Middleton, that is correct. In fact, she Photoshopped it herself.
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“Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” Middleton said in a post on her and Prince William’s X, formerly Twitter, account on Monday morning. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day. C.”
Middleton posted the photo, which shows her sitting down and smiling with her children George, Charlotte, and Louis, to social media on Sunday to commemorate the U.K.’s Mother Day holiday. Ironically, the photo appeared to be aimed at quelling the intense speculation around Middleton’s absence from the public eye for nearly two months after a planned abdominal surgery.
Her rare disappearance set off a swirl of rumors and conspiracy theories, with some stating that it was proof that she and Prince William were having problems in their marriage. Others speculated that she was suffering from a more serious health condition and could be in a coma.
“Thank you for your kind wishes and continued support over the last two months. Wishing everyone a Happy Mother’s Day,” the Sunday photo caption read, ending with “C” to indicate that it was posted by Middleton. The caption also added that it was taken by Prince William in 2024.
As of the time of publication of this article, the photo had been viewed more than 68 million times on X. It was also still available on Middleton and Prince William’s X account.
Middleton’s Mother’s Day Photo Fuels Conspiracies
However, instead of calming the public’s conspiracy theories, Middleton’s recent photo only fueled them. Online sleuths pointed out that Middleton was not wearing her wedding ring in the photo—Gizmodo also could not see a ring on Middleton’s left hand—and that her face appeared different from a paparazzi photo taken less than a week ago. (It’s not clear that it was Middleton in the photo.)
The firestorm only intensified when some of the world’s biggest photo agencies pulled the image from their wires and issued a “kill notice,” claiming the photo had been manipulated. The Associated Press and Getty confirmed to Gizmodo that they had pulled the photo, with the AP stating that Princess Charlotte’s hand been edited.
“The Associated Press initially published the photo, which was issued by Kensington Palace. The AP later retracted the image because at closer inspection, it appears that the source had manipulated the image in a way that did not meet AP’s photo standards,” AP spokesperson Nicole Meir said in an emailed statement. “The photo shows an inconsistency in the alignment of Princess Charlotte’s left hand.”
Reuters and Agence France-Presse also pulled it, according to The Telegraph. The photo agencies did not immediately return Gizmodo’s request for comment.
While I didn’t see what was up with Princess Charlotte’s hand at first, after a lot of concentration and zooming, you can clearly see that part of her left arm has been erased. Some users on X also noticed that Middleton’s hair was strangely blurred, which I can also see. They also pointed out that the Princess’ hand holding Prince George was also blurred (ditto, I see that too).
Gizmodo reached out to media representatives for the royal family on Monday morning but did not immediately hear back.
TLDR: Middleton Is Probably Just a Mom Who Edited a Pic She Didn’t Like
With key words like “royals,” “missing princess,” “kill notice,” and “manipulated photo,” it’s no wonder why this incident quickly snowballed into one of the biggest stories of the last few days. I get it. But I also have a lot of friends who are moms, and a lot of friends who are women, that edit their photos all the time—especially when their significant other is the one snapping the pic. If I had to bet, that’s what probably happened here. (Feel free to remind me if I turn out to be wrong so I can eat my computer.)
In today’s ruthless and fake photo landscape, it’s normal to see “flaws” where there may not be any and want to fix them. Maybe Princess Charlotte had a seam popping out of her sweater, or maybe Middleton had a gray hair that was visible. Technology makes it easier than ever to fix these details or erase them, but it also creates a vicious cycle where people are motivated to keep editing their photos in search of “perfection.”
Unfortunately, while Middleton is probably just a mom who didn’t like the photo her husband took or simply looked at it for way too long, when you’re one of the main members of the UK royal family, you’re not allowed to do normal things like editing your photos. Middleton has been in the royal family’s orbit for more than two decades, so I have no doubt she knows this. But alas, she’s a human who’s recently had abdominal surgery and is under a lot of public scrutiny. In this situation, anyone can make a mistake, even a person who’s known for being a pro at her job.
After enduring the pandemic and a pair of industry-stopping strikes, Hollywood seemed extra jazzed about celebrating itself at this year’s Oscars. While there weren’t a ton of genre movies on the ballot—truly, last year’s Everything Everywhere All at Once sweep still feels rather validating—a few did find their way to the podium.
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Most notably it was Poor Things leading the charge for genre, including a Best Lead Actress win for Emma Stone for her portrayal of Bella Baxter—arguably only rivalled by Oppenheimer, which took home the trio of big wins in Best Lead Actor, Best Director, and Best Picture. Barbie, amid a sea of discourse after nominees were initially announced earlier this year about perceived snubs, home only one win for original song out of its slate of nominations. Here are all the winners (plus their fellow nominees) from the 2024 Academy Awards. And may we just say, if Best Visual Effects winnerGodzilla Minus One does get a sequel, we hope it makes it into more categories than its Best Picture-worthy predecessor.
Best Supporting Actor
Sterling K. Brown (American Fiction)
Robert De Niro (Killers of the Flower Moon)
Winner: Robert Downey Jr. (Oppenheimer)
Ryan Gosling (Barbie)
Mark Ruffalo (Poor Things)
Best Supporting Actress
Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer)
Danielle Brooks (The Color Purple)
America Ferrera (Barbie)
Jodie Foster (Nyad)
Winner: Da’vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers)
Best Animated Feature Film
Winner: The Boy and the Heron
Elemental
Nimona
Robot Dreams
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Best Animated Short Film
“Letter to a Pig”
“Ninety-Five Senses”
“Our Uniform”
“Pachyderme”
Winner: “War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko”
Best Costume Design
Barbie (Jacqueline Durran)
Killers of the Flower Moon (Jacqueline West)
Napoleon (David Crossman & Janty Yates)
Oppenheimer (Ellen Mirojnick)
Winner: Poor Things (Holly Waddington)
Best Live-Action Short
“The After”
“Invincible”
“Knight of Fortune”
“Red, White and Blue”
Winner: “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar”
Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Golda
Maestro
Oppenheimer
Winner: Poor Things
Society of the Snow
Best Original Score
American Fiction (Laura Karpman)
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (John Williams)
Killers of the Flower Moon (Robbie Robertson)
Winner: Oppenheimer (Ludwig Göransson)
Poor Things (Jerskin Fendrix)
Best Sound
The Creator
Maestro
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning
Oppenheimer
Winner: The Zone of Interest
Best Adapted Screenplay
Winner: American Fiction (Cord Jefferson)
Barbie (Noah Baumbach & Greta Gerwig)
Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan)
Poor Things (Tony McNamara)
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer)
Best Original Screenplay
Winner: Anatomy of a Fall (Arthur Harari & Justine Triet)
The Holdovers (David Hemingson)
Maestro (Bradley Cooper & Josh Singer)
May December (Samy Burch & Alex Mechanik)
Past Lives (Celine Song)
Best Cinematography
El Conde (Edward Lachman)
Killers of the Flower Moon (Rodrigo Prieto)
Maestro (Matthew Libatique)
Winner: Oppenheimer (Hoyte van Hoytema)
Poor Things (Robbie Ryan)
Best Documentary Feature Film
Bobi Wine: The People’s President
The Eternal Memory
Four Daughters
To Kill a Tiger
Winner: 20 Days in Mariupol
Best Documentary Short Film
The ABCs of Book Banning
The Barber of Little Rock
Island in Between
Winner: The Last Repair Shop
Nai Nai & Wài Pó
Best Film Editing
Anatomy of a Fall
The Holdovers
Killers of the Flower Moon
Winner: Oppenheimer
Poor Things
Best International Feature Film
Io Capitano
Perfect Days
Society of the Snow
The Teacher’s Lounge
Winner: The Zone of Interest
Best Original Song
“The Fire Inside” (Flamin’ Hot)
“I’m Just Ken” (Barbie)
“It Never Went Away” (American Symphony)
“Wahzhazhe (A Song For My People)” (Killers of the Flower Moon)
Winner: “What Was I Made For” (Barbie)
Best Production Design
Barbie
Killers of the Flower Moon
Napoleon
Oppenheimer
Winner: Poor Things
Best Visual Effects
The Creator
Winner:Godzilla Minus One
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One
Napoleon
Best Lead Actor
Bradley Cooper (Maestro)
Colman Domingo (Rustin)
Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers)
Winner: Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer)
Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction)
Best Lead Actress
Annette Bening (Nyad)
Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon)
Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall)
Carey Mulligan (Maestro)
Emma Stone (Poor Things)
Best Director
Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall)
Martin Scorcese (Killers of the Flower Moon)
Winner: Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer)
Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things)
Johanathan Glazer (Zone of Interest)
Best Picture
American Fiction
Anatomy of a Fall
Barbie
The Holdovers
Killers of the Flower Moon
Maestro
Winner: Oppenheimer
Past Lives
Poor Things
The Zone of Interest
What did you think of this year’s winners? Any favorite moments from the ceremony? Share in the comments below!
Mad Max: Fury Roadwas a revelation when it released in 2015, and a lot of that can be owed to Charlize Theron’s Furiosa. Even with Max Rocktansky getting top billing, it’s more her movie than his, and we’ree now primed to get an origin story with the upcoming Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
Spoilers of the Week | June 3rd
“Saga” is an apt word, it seems. In Empire Magazine’s new write-up on the prequel, the outlet reveals we’ll watch Furiosa—played here by Anya Taylor-Joy—throughout 15 years of her life. “The story is the saga of Furiosa,” explained director/co-writer George Miller, “and how she gets taken from home, and spends the rest of her life trying to get back. ”
In that first trailer, which calls the film Furiosa’s “odyssey” of finding her way back, you get a sense of how much time will be covered. Not only do we see Furiosa as a young child and a young woman donning her black forehead paint for the first time, she also has both of her arms. That trailer ends on the sight of the Furiosa will come to know, prosthetic included, and it’ll be interesting to see how she gets to be an eventual enforcer for Immortan Joe. And while it may be a prequel, Miller has no intent of coasting on the almost 10-year goodwill of that previous movie. “It’s a different animal,” he said. “It’s an odyssey. No question.”
15 years is a long time—Fury Road, for comparison,took place over a couple of days—and as a result, Miller teased we’ll be seeing “many different locations.” Since this is meant to lead directly into its predecessor, he was asked if this meant there’d be a cameo from Tom Hardy’s Max at any point in the film. To that, all he said was the Road Warrior was “lurking in the background. I won’t give away too much about that.”
This past January, HBO canceledOur Flag Means Death after the show’s second season premiered (and wrapped) in October. As with most cancled shows, a fan campaign emerged to try and get HBO to renew the show, while creator David Jenkins said he’d try his best to shop the show around somewhere else that’d be open to a comedy about gay pirates.
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But those dreams are now over, as Jenkins revealed on Instagram the show wouldn’t be picked up at another network or streamer. “We’ve reached the end of the road, at least as far as this sweet show is concerned,” he wrote. “After many complimentary meetings, conversations, etc., it seems there is no alternate home for our crew.” Jenkins went on to thank their fans for their efforts, which were “noticed across the industry”—they’d fundraised enough money for billboards in New York and London, which he says went a ways in helping the cast and crew “deal with the loss.”
“A love like ours can’t disappear in an instant,” he concluded. “When we see each other off in mystic, say hello. We won’t say goodbye, because we’re not leaving. We’re just taking a breather until next time we can share something together.”
Our Flag Means Death was just the latest cancellation in a decent-sized streak from HBO. Along with the likes of Rap Sh!t and The Flight Attendant, the network binned Westworldafter four seasons, in a move that came a surprise to that show’s cast and crew, given it was ready to close things out with season five. Its parent company Warner Bros. Discovery has been on a tear this week—media company Rooster Teeth is being shut down, while it’s preparing to delist titles published by Adult Swim Games, and reportedly refusing to just transfer Steam publishing rights over to those individuals.
If you’ve been thinking to yourself, “I need some new Legos to put on my shelf,” the company’s got you covered. Along with its newly revealed set for Batman: The Animated Series, a new array of sets for its Super Mario line are in the works.
Mario Kart Live But With Hot Wheels!
As part of its Mar10 Day celebration (seen below), Nintendo announced it was partnering with Lego again for three new sets. The Bowser Express Train set, inspired by the characterr’s locomotive in the games, comes with two carriages and a car in the back, plus a pair of train stations individually representing Bowser’s Castle and the Mushroom Kingdom. Like in the games, Lego Mario gets onboard the train by being blasted out of a cannon and onto a handcart.
Celebrating MARIO DAY with LEGO Super Mario
King Boo’s Haunted Mansion sees Lego Luigi fight enemies in the estate and unlock a treasure chest (or sit down on a chouch that floats). Last but not least, the Battle with Roy set has Lego Peach defend her castle from the Koopaling and his Chain Chomp Chariot with Lego Mario and Lego Toad at her side.
At the very end of the video, Lego revealed it was working on Mario Kartsets aiming to drop sometime in 2025. There’s no real glimpse of what it looks like, sadly, but it’s nice to hear that one of the character’s biggest spinoff franchises is getting some bricky love in the near future. Next year is also supposed to see the release of the next Nintendo console—Mario Kart games tend to release early into a system’s lifecycle, so it’s easy to imagine the next mainline entry will come sometime not long after that new console drops.
Adult Swim’s My Adventures with Supermanwas a pleasant surprise when dropped in last year, and one of DC’s best animated outings in some time. Audiences really seemed to get on board with the romcom antics of Superman and Lois Lane, and DC’s taking advantage of that momentum by giving it its own comic miniseries.
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Revealed earlier in the week, the similarly titled comic will be set after the finale of season one and the premiere of the eventual second season. Written by show co-creator Josie Campbell and drawn by Pablo Moreno Collar (Rogues), the comic sees Clark, Lois, and Jimmy in Metropolis during the holidays investigating a sewer creature able to absorb whatever it touches. Per Campbell, the story was something originally planned for season one, but had to be cut for time. Still, Campbell—who previously wrote The New Shazam for DC, along with several Wonder Woman issues and tie-ins to events like Knight Terrors and Lazarus Planet—said the comic would have the same qualities of the show.
“Being the producer of My Adventures with Superman and bringing Clark Kent to TV screens around the world has been nothing but a dream come true for me,” she wrote. “So I’m absolutely thrilled that Pablo and I get to bring fans even more adventures with Superman, this time in comic book form! Get ready for romance, comedy, super-powers, Jimmy Olsen talking a lot about how he’s super-rich now, and all the goodness of the show bundled into this action-packed miniseries.”
Image: DC Comics
“I was completely in love with Adventures the minute I saw the announcement of the series,” added Collar, “and I jumped at the chance to work with Josie on the comic. Superman has always been the reference and the symbol of all that’s good in us, and being part of something like this is a dream come true, and the whole team will give it our best.”
My Adventures with Superman (the comic) debuts with its first issue on June 4. As for season two of the show? No ETA at time of writing, but its first season is still over on Max.
UFOs are back in the news this week with the release of a long-awaited Pentagon report that was designed to address public interest in the topic.
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UFOs (or, rather, UAP, as they’re now known), were injected back into the public consciousness last year thanks largely to a former high-ranking intelligence official, David Grusch, who, after quitting his post at a prominent defense agency, went public with a variety of weird claims about UFOs. Grusch claimed that a highly secretive government program existed that was dedicated to recovering and reverse-engineering crashed UFOs.
Grusch’s allegations led to a bonkers Congressional hearing and a legislative push to investigate the issues he had raised. The new report, which was was authored by the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, was ostensibly meant to investigate whether the government had covered up evidence of extraterrestrial life.
Now the Pentagon’s report is out, and it does nothing to prove the existence of aliens—just the opposite, in fact. The report notably states that the “aggregate findings of all [U.S. Government] investigations to date have not found even one case of UAP representing off-world technology.” In other words, whatever the government’s been looking into, it’s definitely not aliens.
The report notes the role of pop culture in perpetuating “a particularly persistent narrative that the USG—or a secretive organization within it—recovered several off-world spacecraft and extraterrestrial biological remains, that it operates a program or programs to reverse engineer the recovered technology, and that it has conspired since the 1940s to keep this effort hidden from the United States Congress and the American public.”
The report seems to imply that what many witnesses thought were extraterrestrial craft were really just some sort of “black ops” defense technology that the government was testing at the time. The report points to numerous historical programs conducted by the government that involved experimentation with new forms of aircraft, including spaceships.
Grusch’s claims have been bolstered by a gaggle of true believers, but have been met with mystified skepticism by Congress and most of the American public. In addition to his allegations about a UFO retrieval program, Grusch has claimed that Mussolini and the Vatican worked together to recover an alien spacecraft and that UFOs may be evidence of interdimensional beings or time travelers.
Donald Trump appeared to come out in defense of TikTok, the social media platform facing a potential ban by Congress, in a post late Thursday on his social media platform Truth Social—the same platform that experienced a widespread outage as the former president attempted to live-tweet President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech.
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“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!” Trump wrote on Thursday night.
It’s unclear why Trump called Facebook an “enemy of the people,” a phrase that he usually saves for mainstream media outlets not named Fox News. And it doesn’t appear Trump has ever used the nickname “Zuckerschmuck” for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg before, which, according to a simple Google search, looks like the name of a real online store centered around diabetes.
Trump’s opposition to a TikTok ban would be a reversal of policy for the former president, who signed an executive order in the summer of 2020 that would’ve forced TikTok’s parent company in China, ByteDance, to completely divest of the social media site or face a ban on U.S. soil.
Trump’s executive order, which was held up in federal court before being reversed when Biden took office in 2021, called TikTok’s existence a “national emergency” for the U.S. that could threaten the country’s security and economy.
“This mobile application may also be used for disinformation campaigns that benefit the Chinese Communist Party, such as when TikTok videos spread debunked conspiracy theories about the origins of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus,” Trump’s executive order read in a line that’s particularly ironic, given Trump’s embrace of many such conspiracy theories.
The executive order also featured claims of censorship on TikTok by the Chinese Communist Party, especially around, “protests in Hong Kong and China’s treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities.” Because who doesn’t love “Muslim minorities” more than Trump, right?
Why is Trump reversing course on TikTok? Who knows why Trump does anything? Maybe he’s making the calculation that it helps his own social media platform in some way. Or maybe it’s because Trump reportedly saw at least $5.5 million flowing to his businesses from Chinese sources while he was president. Could it have anything to do with the fact that Republican mega-donor Jeff Yass, a billionaire with a big investment in ByteDance, recently had a friendly phone call with Trump, according to Politico?
Better yet, maybe Trump wants to delay a ban until he hypothetically returns to the White House, a tactic he’s already deployed to sink a bipartisan immigration reform deal because he wants to campaign on the issue of a “broken border.” It really could be anything, as far as we know.
But Congress is moving ahead with a potential ban on TikTok, with a bipartisan bill expected to make its way to the House for a vote very soon. The bill already cleared a House committee in a unanimous vote of 50-0. Much like Trump’s original executive order, the bill would force ByteDance to sell the platform and, if the company refused, would allow Congress to ban the site altogether.
The bill has mobilized some of TikTok’s estimated 150 million American users, with Congressional offices reportedly getting flooded on Thursday by calls imploring members of Congress not to ban the app. TikTok even alerted users in the U.S. about the potential ban on Thursday, a move that made politicians quite angry.
President Biden has come out in support of the effort by Congress to get ByteDance to divest and the White House has claimed the president only killed Trump’s executive order to conduct its own security review while it was tied up in federal court. But it will be interesting to see if the courts agree that Congress has the right to ban TikTok, a move that the company says conflicts with the free speech rights of Americans.
“This legislation will trample the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans and deprive 5 million small businesses of a platform they rely on to grow and create jobs,” a TikTok spokesperson told Gizmodo on Thursday.
The House vote hasn’t been scheduled yet, but it sure seems like we’re going to find out sooner rather than later if TikTok has a future in the U.S. Incredibly, Trump wants TikTok to be allowed to continue as usual. At least for now.
As was foretold in Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” music video, in which Christopher Walken danced to a line from Dune (“Walk without rhythm, It won’t attract the worm”), the actor would be destined to join Frank Herbert’s sci-fi universe in Denis Villeneuve’s acclaimed adaptation. In fact, Dune: Part Twobrought Walken out of a four-year acting break.
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In an interview with Vanity Fair, Walken discussed why he took on the role of the formidable Emperor who sets in motion the fall and rise of House Atreides in Dune. “I had, of course, seen the first Dune a number of times. I loved it, and I admired [Villeneuve’s] movies. Arrival, I thought, was wonderful. And to be with all those terrific actors—Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin, Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh, and Stellan Skarsgård—and to go to Budapest, which is a beautiful city. And of course, that’s what I do for a living. It was only, I think, three weeks. So, everything about it was attractive,” he said to the magazine.
Walken, who had somehow not yet been scooped up by a sci-fi epic, also revealed that he was almost in Star Wars but the timing wasn’t right. “I think it was for Han Solo,” Walken shared. “Yes, I auditioned for it. And if I’m not mistaken, my partner in the audition was—I think this is true—it was Jodie Foster. I think we did a screen test. I’m not sure we did a scene. Maybe we just sat in front of, in those days, those old videotape cameras… I did audition for Star Wars, but so did about 500 other actors. It was lots of people doing that.” But as was fated by “Weapon of Choice,” Walken was all along meant to be the Emperor in Dune.
Have you seen a tweet from Grimes making fun of her former partner, Elon Musk, for saying that wealthy ex-wives are destroying Western civilization? The Grimes tweet is fake. The musician didn’t actually poke fun at Musk over the comment. The Musk tweet, on the other hand, is completely real.
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“’Super rich ex-wives who hate their former spouse’ should filed be listed among ‘Reasons that Western Civilization died,’” the billionaire SpaceX CEO tweeted on Wednesday.
Musk’s very real tweet was a response to a user on X who was criticizing MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, over the kinds of organizations to which she donates her money. Scott has given away at least $16 billion since her divorce. But the groups she’s giving to are apparently too woke, in this particular person’s opinion.
A very real tweet from billionaire Elon Musk sent on March 6, 2024. Screenshot: X
And that’s when Musk, a billionaire who’s been married three times, chimed in to give his two cents about how wealthy ex-wives are somehow destroying civilization. Musk didn’t elaborate on how that could be possible, but we digress. All of this is the background necessary to understand the fake Grimes tweet that’s currently going viral.
“Is the ex-wife destroying Western Civilization in the room with us right now?” the snarky fake tweet from Grimes reads.
Musk is the father of at least two children with Grimes, who is often used as a foil in photoshopped jokes about the billionaire. But this one isn’t a real tweet from the musician.
The fake tweet from Grimes (top) over a very real tweet from Elon Musk.Screenshot: X
Who created this fake tweet to make it look like it was sent by Grimes? That appears to be an X account with the name Trap Queen Enthusiast and the handle @marionumber4. Gizmodo confirmed with the creator they indeed conjured this joke into existence on Wednesday, and it seems to be taking on a life of its own, as memes have been known to do.
You can even find the fake tweet on Bluesky, a competitor to X, where people there also believe it’s real.
“Better men have deleted their accounts and retired from the internet after burns half as severe as that,” one Bluesky user said late Wednesday.
And just in case you didn’t think the chain of custody on this fake tweet wasn’t complex enough, another fake screenshot of the Grimes tweet has been created to make it look like a Community Note has been added.
“While she did bear multiple of Elon’s children, Grimes was never technically married to Elon. Elon’s only real ex-wife is merely kinda rich,” the fake Community Note reads.
Yet another fake tweet purporting to show a Community Note on a Grimes tweet. The Musk tweet is the only thing that’s real in this image. Screenshot: X
And that’s how these things spread. A joke that most people within a small online circle fully understand as a joke will break containment, spreading across the internet and even jumping to other social media sites. And then people are left to wonder whether it’s real or not—be it Mike Lindell supposedly driving drunk or an adorable croissant in the shape of a dinosaur.
Checking the official Grimes X account won’t answer the mystery either, as it’s not there and anyone who’s asked can only respond that maybe she deleted it. Well, we’re here to tell you this one is fake because we confirmed it with the creator. But, again, we can’t stress enough that Musk’s bizarre tweet about ex-wives destroying Western civilization is very real. He really is just a very strange dude.
