Brits turn brat as Charli XCX wins big at UK pop music's special night
Pop sensation Charli XCX turned the Brit Awards into the brat awards on Saturday as she claimed five gongs at the annual celebration of UK music.
Fresh from winning three Grammys, the 32-year-old behind the cultural movement "brat summer" won Album Of The Year, the evening's most coveted gong, at the 45th annual awards ceremony in London's O2 Arena.
"Brat", the artist's sixth album and launched in June with its lime-green cover and celebration of a relaxed, partying lifestyle, transformed her into one of the top music stars in 2024.
It redefined the word "brat", which even became associated with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris when fans began applying the coloured "brat" filter to the nominee's images.
"I am living proof that you don't need to compromise," she said on picking up the award.
The album beat off competition from veteran band The Cure, seven-time Brit winner Dua Lipa, jazz group Ezra Collective and indie-rockers The Last Dinner Party.
Charli XCX -- full name Charlotte Aitchison -- also won song of the year for "Guess", featuring Billie Eilish, and thanked the US singer for the collaboration.
"I'm really happy a song about underwear now has a Brit Award," she joked.
Her other two awards on the night were for best artist and best dance act, adding to the best songwriter prize she was awarded on Wednesday.
However, she asked not to perform as she did not want the "added pressure", but laughed at her table when host Jack Whitehall suggested it was because she wanted to get drunk.
- Chappell Roan rewarded -
US star Sabrina Carpenter kicked off the show, which featured a tribute to late One Direction star Liam Payne, with a performance of her global hit "Espresso", flanked by dancers dressed as British soldiers in bearskin-style hats.
Carpenter was presented with The BRITs Global Success award, following an introduction by Motown legend Diana Ross, in recognition of her mammoth sales in 2024.
Other acts to play live included US rapper Teddy Swims and indie singer Sam Fender, who won the best alternative act award.
Ezra Collective claimed the best group award, while The Last Dinner Party won best new artist.
Carpenter lost out on the International Artist Of The Year Award, which boasted a shortlist including Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar, to US singer/songwriter Chappell Roan, who also won international song of the year.
The Brit Awards have recognised the cream of British pop music since they were first held in 1977, but have often been peppered with scandal and farce.
The 1989 Brits are best remembered for the shambolic presenting skills of model Samantha Fox and Fleetwood Mac's Mick Fleetwood and a comical series of mishaps.
Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker stormed the stage in protest while Michael Jackson performed surrounded by children in 1996.
And Madonna suffered whiplash injuries at the 2015 edition when she fell off the stage wearing a giant cape and surrounded by dancers wearing bondage-style costumes and horns on their heads.
After years of chart success by stars such as Ed Sheeran and Adele, British music artists failed to make it into the worldwide annual charts of the year's top 10 bestselling singles and albums in 2024 -- the first time this has happened in more than 20 years.
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San Francisco Chronicle
33 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
David Attenborough's 'Ocean' is a brutal, beautiful wakeup call from the sea
NICE, France (AP) — An ominous chain unspools through the water. Then comes chaos. A churning cloud of mud erupts as a net plows the seafloor, wrenching rays, fish and a squid from their home in a violent swirl of destruction. This is industrial bottom trawling. It's not CGI. It's real. And it's legal. 'Ocean With David Attenborough' is a brutal reminder of how little we see and how much is at stake. The film is both a sweeping celebration of marine life and a stark exposé of the forces pushing the ocean toward collapse. The British naturalist and broadcaster, now 99, anchors the film with a deeply personal reflection: 'After living for nearly a hundred years on this planet, I now understand that the most important place on Earth is not on land, but at sea.' The film traces Attenborough's lifetime — an era of unprecedented ocean discovery — through the lush beauty of coral reefs, kelp forests and deep-sea wanderers, captured in breathtaking, revelatory ways. But this is not the Attenborough film we grew up with. As the environment unravels, so too has the tone of his storytelling. 'Ocean' is more urgent, more unflinching. Never-before-seen footage of mass coral bleaching, dwindling fish stocks and industrial-scale exploitation reveals just how vulnerable the sea has become. The film's power lies not only in what it shows, but in how rarely such destruction is witnessed. 'I think we've got to the point where we've changed so much of the natural world that it's almost remiss if you don't show it,' co-director Colin Butfield said. 'Nobody's ever professionally filmed bottom trawling before. And yet it's happening practically everywhere.' The practice is not only legal, he adds, but often subsidized. 'For too long, everything in the ocean has been invisible,' Butfield said. 'Most people picture fishing as small boats heading out from a local harbor. They're not picturing factories at sea scraping the seabed.' In one harrowing scene, mounds of unwanted catch are dumped back into the sea already dead. About 10 million tons (9 million metrics tonnes) of marine life are caught and discarded each year as bycatch. In some bottom trawl fisheries, discards make up more than half the haul. Still, 'Ocean' is no eulogy. Its final act offers a stirring glimpse of what recovery can look like: kelp forests rebounding under protection, vast marine reserves teeming with life and the world's largest albatross colony thriving in Hawaii's Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. These aren't fantasies; they're evidence of what the ocean can become again, if given the chance. Timed to World Oceans Day and the U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice, the film arrives amid a growing global push to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030 — a goal endorsed by more than 190 countries. But today, just 2.7% of the ocean is effectively protected from harmful industrial activity. The film's message is clear: The laws of today are failing the seas. So-called 'protected' areas often aren't. And banning destructive practices like bottom trawling is not just feasible — it's imperative. As always, Attenborough is a voice of moral clarity. 'This could be the moment of change,' he says. 'Ocean' gives us the reason to believe — and the evidence to demand — that it must be. ___
Los Angeles Times
3 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
‘Somebody hug me!' 7 Emmy hopefuls on staying calm, hitting their marks and more
The Emmys' limited series/TV movie acting categories have come to represent some of the best and most-talked-about shows on television, and this year's crop of contenders is no exception. The seven actors who joined the 2025 Envelope Roundtable were Javier Bardem, who plays father, victim and alleged molester Jose Menendez in Netflix's 'Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story'; Renée Zellweger, who reprises her role as the British romantic heroine in 'Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy'; Stephen Graham, who co-created and stars in 'Adolescence' as the father of a teenage boy who commits a heinous murder; Jenny Slate, who plays the best friend of a terminally ill woman in FX's 'Dying for Sex'; Brian Tyree Henry, who portrays a man posing as a federal agent in order to rip off drug dealers in Apple TV+'s 'Dope Thief'; Elizabeth Banks, who takes on the role of an estranged sibling and recovering alcoholic in Prime Video's 'The Better Sister'; and Sacha Baron Cohen, who appears as the deceived husband of a successful filmmaker in Apple TV+'s 'Disclaimer.' The Times' news and culture critic Lorraine Ali spoke to the group about the emotional fallout of a heavy scene, the art of defying expectations and more. Read highlights from their conversation below and watch video of the roundtable above. Many of you move between drama and comedy. People often think, 'Drama's very serious and difficult, comedy's light and easy.' Is that true? Banks: I think the degree of difficulty with comedy is much higher. It's really hard to sustainably make people laugh over time, whereas [with] drama, everyone relates to loss and pining for love that's unrequited. Not everybody has great timing or is funny or gets satire. Henry: There's something fun about how closely intertwined they are. In my series, I'm playing a heroin addict running for my life, and I have this codependency with this friend … There's a scene where I've been looking for him, and I'm high out of my mind, and I find him in my attic, and all he's talking about is how he has to take a s—. And I'm like, 'But they're trying to kill us.' You just see him wincing and going through all these [groans]. It is so funny, but at the same time, you're just terrified for both. There's always humor somewhere in the drama. Banks: There's a reason why the theater [symbol] is a happy face/sad face. They're very intertwined. Renée, with Bridget Jones — how has she changed over the last 25 years and where is she now with 'Mad About the Boy'? Zellweger: Nobody's the same from one moment to the next, one chapter to the next and certainly not from one year to the next. It's been a really interesting sort of experiment to revisit a character in the different phases of her life. What I'm really grateful for is that the timing runs in parallel to the sort of experiences that you have in your early 20s, 30s and so on. With each iteration, I don't have to pretend that I'm less than I am, because I don't want to be the character that I was, or played, when she was 29, 35. I don't want to do that, and I certainly don't want to do that now. So it was really nice to meet her again in this place of what she's experiencing in the moment, which is bereavement and the loss of her great love, and being a mom, and trying to be responsible, and reevaluating what she values, and how she comports herself, and what's important and all of that, because, of course, I relate to that in this moment. Stephen, 'Adolescence' follows a family dealing with the fallout of their 13-year-old son being accused of a brutal murder. You direct and star in the series. What was it like being immersed in such heavy subject matter? Did it come home with you? Graham: We did that first episode, the end of it was quite heavy and quite emotional. When we said, 'Cut,' all of us older actors and the crew were very emotional. There were hugs and a bit of applause. And then everyone would be like, 'Where's Owen?' [Cooper, the teenage actor who plays Graham's character's son]. 'Is Owen OK? Is he with his child psychologist?' No, Owen's upstairs playing swing ball with his tutor. It was like OK, that's the way to do this — not to take myself too seriously when we say, 'Cut,' but when I am there, immerse myself in it. Let's be honest, we can all be slightly self-obsessed. My missus, she's the best for me because I'd phone her and say, 'I had a really tough day. I had to cry all day. My wife's died of cancer, and it was a really tough one.' She goes, 'The dog s— all over the living room. I had to go shopping and the f— bag split when I got to Tesco. There was a flat tire. They've let the kids out of school early because there's been a flood. And you've had a hard day pretending to be sad?' Bardem: I totally agree with what Stephen says. You have a life with your family and your children that you have to really pay attention to. This is a job, and you just do the job as good as you can with your own limitations. You put everything into it when they say, 'Action,' and when you're out, you just leave it behind. Otherwise, it's too much. Certain scenes, certain moments stay with you because we work with what we are. But I think it doesn't make you a better actor to really stay in character, as they say, for 24 hours. That doesn't work for me. It actually makes me feel very confused if I do that. On the show 'Monsters' I tried to protect Cooper [Koch] and Nicholas [Alexander Chavez], the actors who play the children, because they were carrying the heavy weight on the show every day. I was trying to make them feel protected and loved and accompanied by us, the adults, and let them know that we are there for them and that this is fiction. Because they were going really deep into it, and they did an amazing job. Elizabeth, in 'The Better Sister,' you portray Nicky, a sister estranged from her sibling who's been through quite a bit of her own trauma. Banks: I play a drunk who's lost her child and her husband, basically, to her little sister, played by Jessica Biel. She is grappling with trauma from her childhood, which she's trying not to bring forward. She's been working [with] Alcoholics Anonymous, an incredible program, to get through her stuff. But she's also a fish out of water when she visits her sister, who [lives in a] very rarefied New York, literary, fancy rich world. My character basically lives in a trailer park in Ohio. There's a lot going on. And there's a murder mystery. I loved the complication … but it brought up all of those things for me. I do think you absolutely leave most of that [heaviness] on set. You are mining it all for the character work, so you've got to find it, but I don't need to then infect my own children with it. Sacha, you have played and created these really gregarious characters like Ali G or Borat. Your character in 'Disclaimer,' he's not a character you created, but he is very understated. Was that a challenge? Cohen: It took me a long time to work out who the character was. I said to [director] Alfonso [Cuarón], 'I don't understand why this guy goes on that journey from where we see him in Act 1.' For me it was, how do you make this person unique? We worked a lot through the specificity of what words he uses and what he actually says to explain and give hints for me as an actor. A lot of that was Alfonso Cuarón saying, 'Take it down.' And there was a lot of rewriting and loads of drafts before I even understood how this guy reacts to the news and information that he believes about his wife. Jenny, 'Dying for Sex' is based on a true story about two friends. One has terminal cancer, and the other — your character — supports her right up until the end. Talk about what it was like to play that role in a series that alternates between biting humor and deep grief. Slate: Michelle Williams, who does a brilliant job in this show, her energy is extending outward and [her character] is trying to experiment before she does the greatest experiment of all, which is to cross over into the other side. My character is really out there, not out there willy-nilly, but she will yell at people if they are being rude, wasteful or if she feels it's unjust. [And she's] going from blasting to taking all that energy and making it this tight laser, and pointing it right into care, and knowing more about herself at the end. I am a peppy person, and I felt so excited to have the job that a lot of my day started with calming myself down. I'm at work with Michelle Williams and Sissy Spacek and Liz Meriwether and Shannon Murphy and being, like, 'Siri, set a meditation timer for 10 minutes,' and making myself do alternate nostril breathing [exercises]. Brian, many people came to know you from your role as Paper Boi in 'Atlanta.' The series was groundbreaking and like nothing else on television. What was it like moving out of that world and onto other projects? Henry: People really thought that I was this rapper that they pulled off the street from Atlanta. To me, that's the greatest compliment … When I did 'Bullet Train,' I was shocked at how many people thought I was British. I was like, 'Oh, right. Now I've twisted your mind this way.' I was [the voice of] Megatron at one point, and now I've twisted your mind that way. My path in is always going to be stretching people's imaginations, because they get so attached to characters that I've played that they really believe that I'm that person. People feel like they have an ownership of who you are. I love the challenge of having to force the imaginations of the viewers and myself to see me in a departure [from] what they saw me [as] previously. Because I realize that when I walk in a room, before I even open my mouth, there's 90 different things that are put on me or taken away from me because of how I look and how I carry myself. Javier, since doing the series are you now frequently asked about your own opinions on the Menendez case? The brothers claim their father molested them, and that is in part what led to them murdering their parents. Bardem: I don't think anybody knows. That's the point. That was the great thing about playing that character, is you have to play it in a way that it's not obvious that he did those things that he was accused of, because nobody knows, but at the same time you have to make people believe that he was capable. I did say to Ryan [Murphy] that I can't do a scene with a kid. Because in the beginning, they do drafts, and there were certain moments where I said, 'I can't. It's not needed.' The only moment that I had a hard time was when [Jose] has to face [his] young kid. It was only a moment where Jose was mean to him. That's not in my nature. Henry: I discovered, while doing my series, 'My body doesn't know this isn't real.' There's an episode where I'm shot in the leg, and I'm bleeding out and I'm on all this different morphine and drugs and all this stuff, and I'm literally lying on this ground, take after take, having to mime this. To go through the delusion of this pain ... in the middle of the takes, it was just so crazy. I would literally look at the crew and say, 'Somebody hug me! Somebody!' Stephen, that scene where you confront the boys in the parking lot with the bike, I was just like, 'Oh, my God, how many times did he have to do that?' This kid gets in your face, and I was like, 'Punch the kid!' My heart went out to you, man, not just as the character but as you being in there. Graham: Because we did it all in one take, we had that unique quality. You're using the best of two mediums. You've got that beauty and that spontaneity and that reality of the theater, and then you have the naturalism and the truth that we have with film and television. So by the time I get to that final bit, we've been through all those emotions. When I open the door and go into [Jamie's] room, everything's shaken. But it's not you. It's an out-of-body experience and just comes from somewhere else. Bardem: Listen, we don't do brain surgery, but let's give ourselves some credit. We are generous in what we do because we are putting our bodies into an experience. We are doing this for something bigger than us, and that is the story that we're telling. What have been some of the more challenging or difficult moments for you, either in your career or your recent series? Zellweger: Trying not to do what you're feeling in the moment sometimes, because it's not appropriate to what you're telling. That happens in most shows, most things that you do. I think everybody experiences it where you're bringing something from home and it doesn't belong on the set. It's impossible to leave it behind when you walk in because it's bigger than you are in that moment. Banks: I would say that the thing that I worked on the most for 'The Better Sister' was [understanding] sobriety. I'm not sober. I love a bubbly rosé. So it really did bring up how much I think about drinking and how social it is and what that ritual is for me, and how this character is thinking about it every day and deciding every day to stay sober or not. I am also a huge fan of AA and sobriety programs. I think they're incredible tools for everybody who works those programs. I was grateful for the access to all of that as I was making the series. But that's what you get to do in TV. You get to explore episode by episode. You get to play out a lot more than just three acts. Stephen, about the continuous single shot. It seems like it's an incredibly difficult and complex way to shoot a series. Why do it? Graham: It's exceptionally difficult, I'm not going to lie. It's like a swan glides across the water beautifully, but the legs are going rapidly underneath. A lot of it is done in preparation. We spend a whole week learning the script, and then the second week is just with the camera crew and the rest of the crew. It's a choreography that you work out, getting an idea of where they want the camera to go, and the opportunity to embody the space ourselves. Cohen: That reminds me of a bit of doing the undercover movies that I do because you have one take. ... I did a scene where I'm wearing a bulletproof vest. There were a lot of the people in the audience who'd gone to this rally, a lot of them had machine guns. We knew they were going to get angry, but you've got to do the scene. You've got one time to get the scene right. But you also go, 'OK, those guys have got guns. They're trying to storm the stage. I haven't quite finished the scene. When do I leave?' But you've got to get the scene. I could get shot, but that's not important. Henry: There's a certain level of sociopathy. Slate: I feel like I'm never on my mark, and it was always a very kind camera operator being like, 'Hey, Jenny, you weren't in the shot shoulder-wise.' I feel like such an idiot. Part of it is working through lifelong, longstanding feelings of 'I'm a fool and my foolishness is going to make people incredibly angry with me.' And then really still wanting to participate and having no real certainty that I'm going to be able to do anything but just make all of my fears real. Part of the thing that I love about performance is I just want to experience the version of myself that does not collapse into useless fragments when I face the thing that scares me the most. I do that, and then I feel the appetite for performance again. Do you see yourself in roles when you're watching other people's films or TV show? Graham: At the end of the day, we're all big fans of acting. That's why we do it. Because when we were young, we were inspired by people on the screen, or we were inspired by places where we could put ourselves and lose our imaginations. We have a lot of t— in this industry. But I think if we fight hard enough, we can come through. Do you know what I mean? It's people that are here for the right reasons. It's a collective. Acting is not a game of golf. It's a team. It's in front and it's behind the camera. I think it's important that we nourish that. Henry: And remember that none of us are t—. Bardem: What is a t—? I may be one of them and I don't know it. Graham: I'll explain it to you later.
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
‘Dragonfly' Review: Andrea Riseborough And Brenda Blethyn Give Wings To Paul Andrew Williams' Poignant Neighborhood Drama
Paul Andrew Williams's feature debut was called London to Brighton (2006), but the British director has never been much interested in capital cities. His latest, Dragonfly, is another example of this, being a dark, low-key drama about the ways in which the unnoticed lives of suburban people can make surprising headlines. In a direct way, it's a sister piece to his provocative 2010 home invasion film Cherry Tree Lane, in which—pre-empting Adolescence—a middle-class couple's humdrum live is turned upside down when they are inexplicably attacked by violent teenage rebels without any apparent cause. In reality, though—and despite the blood spilt both onscreen and off—it turns out to be more like the film Williams made in 2012. Called Song for Marion, it starred Terence Stamp as an emotionally shut-down widower who joins a choir to pay homage to his late wife (Vanessa Redgrave). It wasn't a commercial success, and Dragonfly may not be either, but the new film makes better use of that film's ingredients: themes of loneliness, regret, bereavement, self-worth and family. And like Song for Marion, it has quite the cast: two Oscar nominees playing just outside their age range and beyond their comfort zones. More from Deadline Editors Guild Protests Against Nonfiction Producer Story Syndicate At Tribeca Premiere Of OceanGate Submersible Documentary 'Titan' As Tribeca Kicks Off, Toppers Weigh In On Their Growing Festival & Standing Up To Donald Trump Banijay Appoints Factual Drama Chief There's little to no vanity here in the central pairing of Brenda Blethyn, as the elderly widow Elsie, and Andrea Riseborough, as her unemployed neighbor Colleen, and the two very different actors' styles work perfectly together. The film's opening ten minutes sets up the two women's lives with a poignant economy: living in back-to-back bungalows, they lead eerily similar lives, like ghosts. Elsie had a life once and misses it bitterly now, but Colleen never had a life at all. 'So weird,' says Colleen, quite intuitively, when she first visits Elsie's home. 'It's exactly like mine, just the other way round.' Colleen has lived next door to Elsie for some 13 years before the story starts, and it's not quite immediately clear why she should suddenly pop round to offer her services—does Elsie want anything from the shop? But Colleen has been watching the procession of carers that visit Elsie from day to day, and she sees a woman who deserves more than the clock-watching agency nurses who come to give her showers she doesn't need and food that isn't doing her any good at all. There is, as they say, a gap in the market, and Colleen moves fast to fill it, something Elsie appreciates and which helps the once dowdy woman blossom. Compared even to the slow-burn of Williams' last film Bull (2021), the film takes baby steps to reveal itself as a genre film, but the score by Raffertie is ahead of the action at every turn. Nothing will ever really be revealed or explained by the end, but Williams' script sets up so many fascinating ways in which these two very different women — the relatively posh Elsie and the definitely struggling-class Colleen — strike a chord. And key to that is the introduction of Elsie's son John (Jason Watkins). Middle-aged and yet still pathetically upwardly mobile, John is the harbinger here, and his nasty bourgeois values, coming between Elsie and Colleen, turn out to the be the meat in the sandwich. Instead of Chekhov's gun in this scenario we have a dog, and Colleen's inability to control her 'mentalist' crossbreed Sabre does not go well for either of them, leading to a very violent denouement. But Williams' film is not so much concerned with the tension of getting to that and more about the understanding; Andrea Riseborough is just so good at this, bringing the A-game she brought to 2022's To Leslie, but this time with a more jarring child-like innocence, reflected in her pasty, wan complexion. The same goes for Brenda Blethyn, so effortlessly affecting as a wife and mother reduced to becoming a client to the welfare state, a degradation that Colleen just can't begin to tolerate. Williams' films often end with a question mark, and that doesn't always satisfy. With Dragonfly, however, the questions posed are moral and timely, and they will hang around in your head long after as you think about women like Colleen and Elsie and the things in their lives that are missing. It's a mother of a story. Title: DragonflyFestival: Tribeca (International Narrative Competition)Director/screenwriter: Paul Andrew WilliamsCast: Andrea Riseborough, Brenda Blethyn, Jason WatkinsUS Sales: AMP InternationalRunning time: 1 hr 38 mins Best of Deadline Broadway's 2024-2025 Season: All Of Deadline's Reviews Sundance Film Festival U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize Winners Through The Years Deadline Studio At Sundance Film Festival Photo Gallery: Dylan O'Brien, Ayo Edebiri, Jennifer Lopez, Lily Gladstone, Benedict Cumberbatch & More
