Weekend News Roundup! Grammys for Gaga and Arcade Fire; New Radiohead Album This Weekend; Barbie and Ken Are Back Together
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February 14, 2011
“NO, I’M NOT DATING JENNIFER ANISTON—DERRRRRR.“
Happy Valentine’s Monday! Here’s our compendium of pop-culture news you may have missed while you were doing more important things over the weekend.
• Last night’s Grammy Awards were generally surreal: Lady Gaga, who won two awards for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance (“Bad Romance”) and Best Pop Vocal Album (The Fame Monster) arrived in a giant egg and “hatched” out of it to perform “Born This Way.” Cee-Lo Green, who won for Best Urban/Alternative Performance, performed “Forget You” in a gigantic feathered outfit, with a catsuit-clad Gwyneth Paltrow and a gaggle of Muppets. Then Arcade Fire won Album of the Year (The Suburbs). Record of the Year and Song of the Year went to Lady Antebellum (“Need You Now”), while someone named Esperanza Spalding beat Drake, Mumford & Sons, Florence and the Machine, and Justin Bieber for Best New Artist. To all of this, we say, simply: What?! [Grammy]
• Radiohead announced out of the blue that its new album, The King of Limbs, will be available this Saturday. Fans have their choice of two options: a $9–$14 (depending on file type) digital download, or a $48-$53 “Newspaper Album,” which includes two vinyl records, a CD, and a digital download, as well as “many large sheets of artwork, 625 tiny pieces of artwork and a full-colour piece of oxo-degradeable plastic to hold it all together.” [TKOL]
• The weekend box office, which had been pretty stagnant for more than a month, was finally shaken up a bit, with four new movies opening in the top spots: Just Go With It ($31M), Justin Bieber: Never Say Never ($30M), Gnomeo and Juliet ($25.5M), and The Eagle ($8.6M). The Roommate closed out the top 5 with $8.4M. [BOM]
• Because Jake Gyllenhaal attended Jennifer Aniston’s birthday party at The Spotted Pig, the two are being romantically linked. “They looked like they were strategizing a way to exit the restaurant probably because they didn’t want to be photographed together,” explains a witness. This is… probably not true! [L&S]
• Daphne Guinness told Harper’s Bazaar that philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy is “quite obviously the love of my life,” despite the fact that Lévy is still married to actress Arielle Dombasie. We wonder whether he’s going to concoct a poststructuralist argument for why he doesn’t have to give either of them a Valentine this year. [P6]
• America’s sweetheart-iest plastic couple (sorry, Speidi), Barbie and Ken, are officially back together as of this morning, when Barbie changed her Facebook status to “In a Relationship.” Barbie and Ken broke up in 2004 after 43 years together, and their reunion is the result of a publicity blitz from Mattel wherein fans could vote on the fate of their relationship online. [EW]
