The 2020 ESPYs took place on Sunday night, with Megan Rapinoe, Sue Bird, and Russell Wilson serving as the remote hosts for the show that typically takes center stage during the lone major sports-less night of the calendar — the day after the MLB All-Star Game.

However, this year’s festivities were moved up due to the ongoing pandemic that has kept the U.S. major sports leagues on hiatus for the last three months, as ESPN continues trying to fill the Sunday night airwaves following The Last Dance. As one might expect given the current climate, this year’s event took on a bit of a more serious tone than usual. The three hosts opened the show with a call to action for Black Lives Matter and the ongoing movement against systemic racism and police brutality that’s led to protests in major cities around the country and world for more than a month, along with a powerful video from many in the sports world.

ESPN also had Snoop Dogg pay tribute to a fellow L.A. legend in a video about Kobe Bryant, who died along with his daughter Gianna and seven others in a helicopter crash that rocked the sports world earlier this year.

It’s a touching tribute, with Snoop pointing to Kobe’s lasting legacy and saying “this is your city,” as a montage of Kobe’s finest moments on the court were interspersed with the numerous murals put up to honor him after his death. Given that this took place on Father’s Day, when a number from the NBA community remembered Bryant for what he did off the court and his proud status as a “girl dad,” it was a fitting tribute from one L.A. icon to another.

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The latest Star Wars trilogy may have proven controversial, but there’s one thing most people can agree on: Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron was one of its key assets. He had the swagger of an old fashioned hero even as the movies critiqued his type; in The Last Jedi, he’s as bold as he is reckless, and not every feat of derring-do paid off. (Isaac wanted them to go even further with the character.) So here’s some potentially bad news: While it’s still up in the air if we’ll ever see the kids from the last three episodes, don’t count on Isaac returning.

The esteemed actor was speaking to Deadline (in a bit teased out by ComicBook.com) when he explained that, all things considered, Star Wars isn’t really his bag. Here’s what he said:

“I enjoyed the challenge of those films and working with a very large group of incredible artists and actors, prop makers, set designers, and all that was really fun. It’s not really what I set out to do. What I set out to do was to make handmade movies, and to work with people that inspire me. Paul [Schrader]’s movies, the things that he’s made, it’s in my DNA. I’m not alone, obviously. [For] every actor of a certain generation, those are the films that made them who they are, so that’s certainly my case. It feels like for me a personal turning point and that, as far as I’m concerned, it has nothing to do with the finished product. It’s the process of doing this.”

When pressed if he’d ever return to Star Wars, he joked, “Probably, but who knows. If I need another house or something.”

Isaac, of course, has done plenty of big franchise numbers, like the 2010 Robin Hood, The Bourne Legacy, and X-Men: Apocalypse — in which he played the titular baddie — he’s more into challenging fare, such as Inside Llewyn Davis, A Most Violent Year, and Ex Machina. He’ll also be seen, allegedly at year’s end, in another sci-fi classic: the latest adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune.

(Via Deadline and ComicBook.com)

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Including unbreakable plates, a shampoo bar, and suuuuper soft undies.

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I’m talking pre-Freeform days here…

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You better hope you’re not one…

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When it bowed back in 2018, the HBO show Random Acts of Flyness immediately stood out as visionary, unique television — a kind of sketch show that was described by its creator, Terence Nance, as a “fluid, mind-melting stream-of-conscious response to the contemporary American mediascape.” Among its subjects was race in Trump-era America. And since a lot of films and shows about African-American life has been made free in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests that have filled the country’s streets these last three weeks, it was only a matter of time before it joined the pack.

And so it has: As per Deadline, Nance’s show — which runs a mere six episodes, and should only take you a little over three hours to watch in full — can now be streamed on HBO’s YouTube Channel, through June 26.

Nance — whose shape-shifting 2012 feature An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is well worth tracking down, and who wound up dropping out of what would have hopefully been a wonderfully bizarre sequel to Space Jam — released a lengthy statement about the show and its relevance to what’s happening right now.

“It seems like everyday people ask me if and when Random Acts of Flyness will come back,” Nance wrote. He then suggests one reason is because, over the last two years, he and his creative team have been absorbing the countless things happening in the culture:

I don’t speak for the wonderful group of artists who made the show but I hypothesize that we were working to process and heal through the constant acceleration of the violence we survive – centering our body-spirit(s) and our swarms in the doing. Heal how? Heal by using the tools we are given by our ancestors, our progeny, and being(s) whose nature we have no words for: movement, touch, stories, our time, vibe, irresolution, rest, folly, and fun.

Nance wound things down by saying that he hopes “the show can help us heal in real time – from the violence: the misogynoir, the transphobia, the white supremacy the socialism for whites that we misname capitalism.” Concluding, he wrote, “I hope it can be a part of the understanding, the reading, the feeling, the healing. I intend this on behalf of my ancestors, backward and forward in spacetime, Season II coming soon.”

You can read Nance’s full statement at Deadline and you can watch the show on HBO’s YouTube Channel.