Category: Worldwide

Remember when the Oscars had a host? You might not. After all, it’s been a while. The last time was 2018, four whole years ago, when Jimmy Kimmel hosted for the second time in a row. The first time Kimmel emceed, in 2017, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway gave the Best Picture trophy to the wrong movie. Kimmel made jokes about the awkward mix-up. It was great. It showed that the Oscars need a host. But they’ve been without it the last three ceremonies, for a myriad of awkward reasons. But now, it looks like that era is thankfully, after much imploring, coming to an end.

As per The Hollywood Reporter, the 94th iteration of the Academy Awards, scheduled for March 27, will finally go back to having one fun person lord over the program. Who will it be? Maybe Tom Holland. Not only did the current Spider-Man — who can even do a little soft-shoe — express interest in hosting the show, but the Academy reportedly reached out to him as well. So that might happen.

It might also get people — such as the record number of people watching him in Spider-Man: No Way from Home despite a re-spiking pandemic — to watch an annual show that has fallen in the ratings. The first time the Oscars went hostless, in 2019, the show’s ratings actually rose a bit, from 26.62 million in 2018 with Kimmel to 29.56 million. Then things took a nasty turn. In 2020, sans host, it dipped to 23.64 million. Last year, again with no hosts (and a lot of social distancing and long speeches), it plummeted to 10.40 million.

So now we’re getting a host again. When the news broke, people had lots of suggestions. Or at least jokes.

Some suggestions were semi-serious.

In fact, some of these are good ideas.

If Tom Holland doesn’t pan out, maybe the Academy can think outside the box.

(Via THR)

Despite reports indicating that his job was safe a little earlier this week, Joe Judge’s time as the head coach of the New York Giants has come to an end. According to multiple media reports, Judge is out in the Big Apple after spending two years at the helm of the franchise.

The news of Judge’s ouster comes on the heels of general manager Dave Gettleman announcing his retirement on Monday. According to Ian Rapoport, the decision to can judge comes after the team’s ownership met earlier in the day on Tuesday and decided the best thing would be to have a fresh start.

Judge had never been a head coach before getting an opportunity with the Giants. Prior to taking the job, Judge spent eight years in New England as an assistant on Bill Belichick’s staff — he started as a special teams assistant before taking over as the team’s special teams coordinator in 2015, and in his final year, he added wide receivers coach to his list of duties.

His tenure with the Giants was not especially successful. Judge, who the team reportedly hired after Matt Rhule opted to take the head coaching job with the Carolina Panthers, went 10-23 in his two years in charge, including a 4-13 mark this year. In his final game, New York attempted a pair of quarterback sneaks on second and third down from inside their own 5-yard line, and after the game, Judge said they did this in an attempt to give their punter more room to get off a kick. The Giants lost that game, 22-7.

Pokémon Legends: Arceus is a highgly anticipated upcoming Pokémon game for the Nintendo Switch. What makes this game different from our typical Pokémon affair is the concept. This is an open-world game set in the Pokémon universe. That means all of us who have dreamed about climbing mountains and exploring the farthest lands in search of Pokémon may soon have that dream come true.

In this new teaser trailer for the game, we learn all about the Hisui region. This new region is set in a time before the Pokédex, with extremely primitive Pokéballs, and it’s up to us as the player to create the first ever Pokédex, and it feels like this is a prequel for the entire series. There’s a chance that, if this game is successful enough, it could spin off into a series that releases alongside the mainline traditional games. At minimum, the more popular aspects of it may have some impact on the mainline games.

Platform: Nintendo Switch
Price: $60
Release Date: January 28 (1/28)
Genre: RPG
Developer: Game Freak
Publisher: Nintendo
Rating: E
Where can I buy this: Nintendo eShop, Brick and Mortar stores
Single Player: Yes
Multiplayer: Unlikely
Early Access: No
Microtransactions: Unsure

As with most dramatic pop culture moments, it all started with an Instagram story.

“Are you guys into crypto????” Kim Kardashian posted to her 250 million Instagram followers last June. “This is not financial advice but sharing what my friends just told me about the Ethereum Max token! A few minutes ago Ethereum Max burned 400 trillion tokens—literally 50% of their admin wallet giving back to the entire E-Max community.” Now, Kardashian is among a slew of celebrities being sued by investors of Ethereum Max, in what is being considered a pump and dump scheme.

Also being sued are boxer Floyd Mayweather and NBA star Paul Pierce, who similarly used their social media accounts to post about Ethereum Max last spring between May and June. Ethereum Max peaked on May 31st 2021, before falling drastically over the next several weeks. The token has lost nearly 97% of its price.

The class action complaint claims that the celebrities were already paid in tokens for their sponsorships, so their posts effectively convinced thousands of Kardashian’s loyal fans to invest in something that suddenly became worthless. “In truth, Defendants marketed the EMAX Tokens to investors so that they could sell their portion of the Float for a profit.” It also alleges violations of state consumer protection laws.

Kardashian has yet to comment on her involvement in the scheme, but she isn’t the first celeb to encourage their fans to do something like this.

Naomi (CW, 9:00pm) — Ava DuVernay brings us this story about a Naomi McDuffie, a comic-book addict and Superman superfan. She also happens to be an ace student and a skateboarder who’s attempting to make sense of a stunt in her hometown that causes unexpected consequences.

Superman & Lois (CW, 9:00pm) — Smallville’s still rocked by the previously climactic confrontation with dust swirling and Lois and Clark having couple issues and Chrissy struggling with an issue of her own.

Judge Steve Harvey (ABC, 8:00pm) — Nope, the perpetual Miss Universe host is not a real judge, but he is doing the unscripted reality thing and making apparently binding decisions. This week, a couple’s at war over their 20 year history, which involves one of them wanting marriage and the other very much resisting.

Black-ish (ABC, 9:30pm) — Dre’s attempting to land a fantastic marketing pitch to no avail, all while Bow and Ruby are fretting over Diane’s new love interest.

Queens (ABC, 10:00pm) — Can the ladies shake their old rivalries? They’re sure gonna try, all while Jill’s attempting to reckon with her past and her pain-in-the-butt father.

Undercover: Season 3 (Netflix series) –This season picks up with Bob fired from his cop job while also staring down some prison time. Elsewhere, Ferry gets sprung from prison, but his old life didn’t wait around for him to return. And meanwhile, a Turkish couple’s leading a much smarter gang than the one that previously ruled the roost.

In case you missed this streaming pick:

The Tender Bar (Amazon Prime movie) — This team up between director George Clooney and Ben Affleck, who portrays an uncle who owns that bar in the title, is a coming-of-age tale but also a rich character study. Tye Sheridan portrays the nephew who’s also an inspiring writer who’s hoping to conquer both his personal and professional lives. Affleck’s portraying not only a bartender but a terribly charismatic dude who helps young J.R. learn about life and also fulfill those all-important dreams.

One thing about rap fans: We will get these jokes off — no matter the target. Even COVID-19, the virus that has completed upended the normal workings of society for the past two years, isn’t safe. Thanks to a news outlet’s tweet of a mutant variant of the virus — a combination of the Delta and Omicron variants dubbed, naturally, “Deltacron” — folks on Twitter are comparing the image to the cover of a fan-favorite trap album.

While the computer-generated images of the COVID-19 coronavirus floating around are mostly just simulated magnifications of what the virus would look like under a powerful microscope, CTV News’ choice of color scheme and the shape of the mutant strain resemble nothing so much as the cloudy, Rorschach-like splotches on Future’s DS2 cover. So, it didn’t take long for fans to spot the resemblance and turn the new strain into the butt of plenty of jokes playing on the album’s title, themes, and lyrics.

“You know we talk that sick talk, that sick talk,” joked one fan over a post that added the DS2 title card to the Deltacron image. “I just took a piss and I seen COVID coming out,” cracked another.

All jokes aside, it looks like we can chalk the so-called Deltacron variant up to a lab error, just like another purported super strain, “Flurona.” For now, it looks like we don’t have to worry about any fusion variants, because the original recipe is still nasty enough. They say laughter is the best medicine, though, so feel free to check out some more of the fans’ jokes and give yourself your daily dose of chuckles below.

A couple months ago, Foo Fighters revealed that they had made their own horror-comedy movie, Studio 666, that’s set to hit theaters on February 25. Now, the band has shared the first trailer for the movie and it’s pretty wild.

The trailer offers an outline of the plot: The band rents an old house to record a new album, but things quickly sour when Dave Grohl becomes possessed by a demonic spirit, which is a good-news-bad-news scenario: It boosts Grohl’s creativity in a big way, but it also turns him dangerously violent and evil.

There are a couple of funny bits in the trailer as well, like when Grohl shares a new song idea that’s actually just “Everlong,” and when he says he discovered a new musical note: “It’s an L,” he declares as he floats out of the room.

Starring in the film alongside the band — Grohl, Taylor Hawkins, Nate Mendel, Pat Smear, Chris Shiflett, and Rami Jaffee — are Whitney Cummings, Leslie Grossman, Will Forte, Jenna Ortega, and Jeff Garlin. Press materials describe the film, “In Studio 666, the legendary rock band Foo Fighters move into an Encino mansion steeped in grisly rock and roll history to record their much anticipated 10th album. Once in the house, Dave Grohl finds himself grappling with supernatural forces that threaten both the completion of the album and the lives of the band.”

Watch the Studio 666 trailer above.

After barely a week on Gettr, the MAGA alternative to Twitter, Joe Rogan is already blasting the social media site as “f*ckery.” While appearing on the latest episode of The Tim Dillon Show, Rogan didn’t hold back his thoughts on the app, which apparently annoyed him so much that he started dunking on Marjorie Taylor Greene and QAnon. At issue is the fact that Gettr artificially inflates your follower count by simply copying your Twitter follows, which Rogan did not appreciate, along with reports that the site is backed by a Chinese billionaire.

“I might be part of the Chinese Communist Party now, I believe,” Rogan quipped before tearing into his experience on Gettr, which he described as “fugazi.” Via The Daily Beast:

The comedian then suggested that he’d consider removing his Gettr profile, but “I don’t know how to get off,” he remarked. “Like if I get off of Gettr, I don’t think I can.”

“You have you have to sit down with Marjorie Taylor Greene, personally,” Dillon joked.

“She’s gonna tell me all about what’s in the basement of Comet Pizza,” Rogan chuckled in response.

In a statement to The Daily Beast, Gettr CEO Jason Miller said that the site has been in contact with Rogan’s team and “hope that we have addressed any concerns he may have.” So we’ll see if Rogan ends up satisfied and walks back his criticism of the social media platform, which he claimed to have joined out of fear that Twitter was getting out of control.

“Just in case sh*t over at Twitter gets even dumber, I’m here now as well,” Rogan posted on his new Gettr account last week. “Rejoice!”

Maybe not so much.

(Via The Daily Beast)

Back in 2020, there were several reunion tours set to take place that ended up getting canceled when the live music and touring industry shut down. ’90s indie rock group Pavement were set to reunite in 2020, and they’re now planning to hit the road in 2022. But there is another ’90s band that has rescheduled their much-anticipated reunion: Golden Smog.

Golden Smog is an alt-country supergroup who formed in the late ’80s with members of several popular midwestern musicians at the time including Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, The Jayhawks’ Gary Louris and Marc Perlman, Soul Asylum’s Danny Murphy, Big Star’s Jody Stephens, and Run Westy Run’s Kraig Johnson. The group have released a number of albums and EPs over the years, including Weird Tales and Down By The Old Mainstream.

Golden Smog were originally supposed to get together in April 2020 to play a show in Minneapolis, and two years later, the Golden Smog reunion shows have finally been rescheduled. Now, the band is set to take the stage in Minneapolis’ First Avenue venue on April 2 and April 3.

First Avenue made the official announcement on social media, saying 2022 also marks the venue’s 50th anniversary.

Tickets for Golden Smog’s reunion dates are on sale now. Get them here.

There’s a whole lot of risk involved if a Twitch streamer tries to change their brand. Gaining a following on the platform is extremely difficult, requires a ton of work, and can take years to build. As a result, when most streamers gain a following, they’re reluctant to stray too far from what got them to that point. This can, unfortunately, lead to burnout, because it’s exhausting doing the same thing every day, but that fear of throwing away what got you to this point keeps many of these streamers doing only one thing.

Esfand, however, took that risk. After gaining popularity through World of Warcraft streams on YouTube and Twitch, he decided to start doing more with football. He didn’t stop playing World of Warcraft because he lost his passion for the game — instead, he wanted to focus on one of his first loves.

“I was making videos while I was between jobs,” Esfand tells UPROXX. “I used to work in college football and I did a lot of recruiting, I did a lot of video. Basically, digital type of stuff is what I did, and I wanted to get into coaching, but I was between jobs and looking for another job at a different school, and I started playing private server World of Warcraft. This is about five years ago. I started playing and I used to play a lot of World of Warcraft 15, 16 years ago, and I was really good back then. So, when I came back and I started playing I was like, ‘Oh there’s no good like guides out there [for my] Retribution Paladin.’

“So I started making these videos just to kind of stay in practice and then slowly, my videos started picking up traction,” he continues. “And then, honestly, within a few months, I was just like, ‘Oh, well, I’m going to start streaming.’ I started streaming because I wanted to record my raids, but I didn’t have enough hard drive space on my computer to actually record my raids and post them. So I started streaming on YouTube initially just because I just wanted to just have, like, four hour videos. I just didn’t have enough hard drive space, so I just threw them up there. And then I slowly became the most watched WoW private server streamer.”

For Esfand, this new popularity was a cool chance to break away from the grind of college football and do something different. That was until he got hit with a DMCA from Blizzard because he was streaming private servers of World of Warcraft. After that, he decided the best move was to give Twitch a try. Thankfully, Twitch had grown rapidly over the years and wasn’t just a video game streaming site anymore. He had an opportunity to put his personality on display through a variety of options such as IRL streams, variety streams, and football — he felt a strong personal connection to the latter from playing the sport growing up, working in the industry, and having friends in the NFL.

But to make football a regular part of his streams, he was going to have to take on the risk of alienating his built-up World of Warcraft fanbase.

“I always wanted to do more football on Twitch and I always wanted to do more sports on Twitch, but it was kind of hard at first because it’s a big transition, right?” Esfand says. “Going from a game like World of Warcraft to real life sports — especially football, because WoW has a heavy European audience, whereas American football obviously has a much more American audience. And it started really last year whenever the new Madden came out. I was like, look, I love Madden. I used to go to every midnight release. Me and my friends back in high school, we would just go play Madden all night the first night it came out. [I decided] I’m just gonna [stream] for, like, a week and have some fun with it. And at first, it did okay. It didn’t do particularly well on my channel, but I just kind of stuck with it and I was like, I’m just going to keep doing this and I’m gonna try and make content around football, but not necessarily make football content directly.”

Getting an audience that cares about World of Warcraft to invest their time and attention in football requires a gigantic personality. Fortunately, you need to have that in order to build a following on a personality-driven platform like Twitch, and Esfand’s bet was that he’d be able to keep people entertained regardless of the subject matter, in part because he placed an emphasis on reducing “the barrier of entry” so that anyone would be able to take in one of his streams and enjoy it, regardless of the topic of conversation.

As Esfand continued to stream Madden and discuss football, he eventually found a way to capture new viewers while making his longstanding fans happy. He created a character, a Texas-accented football coach who rattles through the coachspeak fans of the sport hear every single week. That made his streams a television show where fans were tuning in to watch a character. It would go on to become the best decision Esfand could make.

These days, Esfand is still letting his coach personality get him through seasons of Madden, but he’s starting to get the opportunity to expand what he does. In October, he began a new show called “Let’s Go Football” that mixes the vibes of a podcast and an NFL show on an afternoon slot on ESPN. He has former Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker Ryan Shazier and streamer Grandpoobear as his cohosts. The trio discuss the NFL, watch highlights, and make picks in such a way that Esfand’s usual community tunes in.

“I think the big thing with Twitch that gives it a very unique experience is the chat,” Esfand says. “I think Twitch chat and having a community of people watching the show together or watching a stream, whatever it is, and building that sort of connection with not even just streamer to viewer, but viewer to viewer. My Stream is very community-centric. I have so many people in my stream who have made friends with one another and they’ve started playing games together and it’s kind of hard to explain, but I know a very large portion of my chat. I go live every day and I see a bunch of people in chat and I know who those people are just because I see them every day, right? I talk to them every day. I won’t be streaming and they’ll be sitting in offline chat. I had people sitting in my offline chat all day on my Twitch page just talking.”

It’s a story we hear constantly from people who stream on Twitch: It’s not about what is actually on the stream as much as it’s about the community they build. As fans seek out new ways to enjoy their favorite sports, many of them are turning to personalities and communities they’re already familiar with. When they want to watch a football show they don’t tune into the traditional TV shows. They go on to Twitch. When they want to watch a game they don’t go watch it on a traditional broadcast. They go find their favorite streamer and watch it with them. This is the future of sports and the community around Esfand is an example of that. They’re there to watch the game with the guy who got popular uploading his World of Warcraft raids on YouTube.