— TV personality, producer and actor Terrance J will host the Oscars red carpet pre-show, the Academy announced on Wednesday.
The 39-year-old shared his excitement for the upcoming gig in an Instagram post, saying, “From backstage corespondent to award winning executive producer to Co Hosting the biggest Red Carpet Show in the world on @abc!!! Check me out at the @theacademy Awards this Sunday! Dreams come true!” The Academy Awards are this coming Sunday.
Vanessa Hudgens and fashion designer Brandon Maxwell will aid in host duties for the 90-minute special that will highlight Oscar nominees, performers and presenters.
— Grammy-winning producer Swizz Beats is joining the vinyl world by way of partnership with high-end luxury vinyl brand 12On12. Music Week revealed the news last month but recently spoke with the Verzuz creator, who says he “always wanted to be an owner in a wax company.”
“12On12 was the perfect opportunity because not only do they deal with vinyl, we’re dealing with art and lifestyle, too,” Swizz said.
— Rap-A-Lot Records founder James Prince is calling for major artists including Drake, Kanye West, The Weeknd and Nicki Minaj to boycott the upcoming Grammy Awards and instead host their own event. The hip-hop executive shared an article of the recent news of Kanye’s banning from the Grammys, soliciting the musicians not to take part in the show.
“HIP HOP VS. THE GRAMMYS,” Prince said, tagging the artists. “The powers that be will be mad at me about this one but F*** EM! I love the culture! The seed is planted … let’s water it!”
Nicki Minaj commented, “Respect” along with the high five emoji.
The 2022 Grammy Awards, hosted by Trevor Noah, happen April 3.
The family drama CODA, which was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Picture, is now getting the stage musical treatment.
Deaf West Theatre, which declares they’re dedicated to “bridging the gap between the Deaf and hearing worlds,” is aiming to take the film about a young woman raised in a deaf family to the Broadway stage.
“In the movie, there’s a scene where the Deaf members of the Rossi family are confronted with an inaccessible school performance, so they experience Ruby’s song through the joy of other people in the audience,” recalls the theater group’s Artistic Director D.J. Kurs.
“This live adaptation is an opportunity to bring the story full-circle by bringing it back to the Deaf community, making the show fully accessible in both ASL [American Sign Language] and spoken English,” Kurs notes. “[W]e are both honored and excited to embark on this live iteration of a story that brings together both sides of the aisle and addresses the different ways that we move throughout the world.”
She’s one of the most accomplished figures in the entertainment business, but Dolly Parton’s still got some items to check off her bucket list. Namely, she’d like to be a part of a Broadway production, and she’d like to helm a musical biopic about her life.
“I do intend someday to be on Broadway, and but I’m thinking now that I might do my life story as a feature,” the 76-year-old legend declared during an appearance on radio show “Mr. Nashville Speaks,” according to Variety.
“Maybe possibly even a musical feature,” the singer added. “So we’re in talks about that.”
Dolly explains that a Broadway musical production seemed on the horizon a couple of years ago, but the COVID-19 pandemic pushed that idea to the back burner. Ultimately, she changed her mind about the project — for now, at least.
In the meantime, Dolly’s been checking items off her career to-do list left and right. She just put out a novel, co-written with James Patterson, called Run, Rose, Run. Earlier this week, she announced that that novel is being adapted into a movie, and she’ll play the starring role.
Dolly was also named one of 16 nominees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year, an honor that she attempted to graciously decline, on the grounds that she hadn’t earned it. The Hall of Fame kept her on the ballot, so Dolly just might get inducted despite her wishes.
Either way, she said, the nomination had inspired her to make a rock ‘n’ roll album at some point in the future.
beabadoobee has announced a new album called Beatopia.
The sophomore follow-up to 2020’s Fake It Flowers will arrive July 15. You can listen to the single “Talk” now via digital outlets.
“Generally, it’s about doing things that aren’t necessarily healthy or great for you, but you can’t help indulging,” beabadoobee says of “Talk.” “It’s like that unavoidable feeling that you get. You can’t get rid of it, and you know it’s bad, but you love it really, and its whatever, so you do it anyways.”
beabadoobee will hit the road in support of Beatopia starting April at Coachella. She’ll also play a number of headlining dates, as well as shows opening for Halsey and Bleachers.
Here’s the Beatopia track list:
“Beatopia Cultsong”
“10:36”
“Sunny Day”
“See You Soon”
“Ripples”
“The Perfect Pair”
“Broken CD”
“Talk”
“Lovesong”
“Pictures of Us”
“Fairy Song”
“Don’t Get the Deal”
“Tinkerbell Is Overrated” feat. PinkPantheress
“You’re Here That’s the Thing”
Are you ready for some Journey? The Rock and Roll Hall of Famers have been tapped to perform at a special concert this summer that will help celebrate the 2022 inductees into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Journey will headline the 2022 Concert for Legends, taking place August 6 at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium in Canton, Ohio, one of the events being held in conjunction with Pro Football Hall of Fame Enshrinement Week.
An as-yet-unannounced guest artist will open the concert and will be revealed in the coming weeks.
The 2022 Enshrinement Week will see over 100 Pro Football Hall of Famers visiting Canton to participate in a variety of planned festivities at Hall of Fame Village, where the Hall of Fame museum and stadium are located.
Journey currently is in the middle of their spring Freedom Tour 2022 of North America with Toto. The trek is mapped out through a May 16 show in Quebec City, Canada. The band also will release a new studio album called Freedom later in the year.
(WASHINGTON) — Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday announced that the State Department has made a formal assessment that Russian forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine.
“Based on information currently available, the U.S. government assesses that members of Russia’s forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine. Our assessment is based on a careful review of available information from public and intelligence sources,” Blinken said in a statement.
The assessment does not come with any new U.S. sanctions, but it backs a global push for accountability for Russia’s artillery and airstrikes on civilians and civilian infrastructure.
President Joe Biden has said he believes Russian leader Vladimir Putin is a “war criminal,” an accusation that the Russian government said threatened diplomatic relations between the two countries, already strained to their breaking point over Putin’s war against Ukraine.
But whether the war crimes assessment means Putin himself is a war criminal will depend on an individual court of law, according to U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaack.
“There are doctrines under international law and domestic law that are able to reach all the way up the chain of command,” she told reporters Wednesday, but whether that includes the Russian leader “would depend on a court that has jurisdiction,” she said.
Van Schaack wouldn’t say how the U.S. will push for accountability for what it has now deemed war crimes, adding, “Everything’s on the table. We’re considering all the various options for accountability.”
That includes the International Criminal Court, which has opened an investigation into potential war crimes, and domestic courts, including in neighboring countries who may gain custody of Russian service members or conduct trials in absentia.
But the U.S. legal system is ill-equipped to handle cases, Van Schaack said, because the U.S. War Crimes Act limits prosecutions to U.S. citizens who are perpetrators or victims. Congress is considering amending that law, she said.
Because the U.S. is not a party to the ICC, she said they have no “affirmative cooperation duties,” but left open the possibility for cooperating with it.
Russia and Ukraine are also not parties to the ICC, but Ukraine reached an agreement with the court to grant it jurisdiction to investigate potential war crimes dating back to Russia’s first invasion in 2014 when it seized the Crimean Peninsula and sparked the separatist war in eastern provinces known as the Donbas.
Van Schaack declined to speak to individual attacks that backed up the new U.S. assessment, but she and Blinken pointed to Russia directly targeting sites that were clearly marked for civilian use.
“Russia’s forces have destroyed apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, critical infrastructure, civilian vehicles, shopping centers, and ambulances, leaving thousands of innocent civilians killed or wounded. Many of the sites Russia’s forces have hit have been clearly identifiable as in-use by civilians,” Blinken said in his statement.
This includes the Mariupol maternity hospital and “a strike that hit a Mariupol theater, clearly marked with the word ‘дети’ — Russian for ‘children’ — in huge letters visible from the sky. Putin’s forces used these same tactics in Grozny, Chechnya, and Aleppo, Syria, where they intensified their bombardment of cities to break the will of the people,” Blinken added.
Van Schaack said individual Russian service members who conducted these attacks could be prosecuted, but so too could their commanders who were responsible for them and were either complicit in the attacks or even just because they didn’t stop their forces from conducting them.
The State Department will continue to compile evidence of war crimes and share them with the appropriate bodies, including Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office, which has said it’s recorded over 2,400 “crimes of aggression and war crimes” in the month-long war and identified 127 suspects, prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova told the AFP.
That evidence includes not just video, photos, and other publicly available information, but U.S. intelligence, including intercepted communications between Russian service members, according to Van Schaack, who said all of it is being preserved for future trials.
“We don’t want to lose that evidence. We don’t want that evidence to be tampered with. So it’s extremely important that it be collected now and preserved with an eye towards future accountability,” she told reporters.
For weeks, U.S. officials, up to and including Biden, hinted that the U.S. was seeing evidence that Russia was committing war crimes, but deferred to a formal assessment from Van Schack’s office, the State Department’s office of global criminal justice.
Still, Biden told reporters last week he believed Putin is a “war criminal” — a comment that the Russian Foreign Ministry summoned U.S. ambassador John Sullivan over, warning it put U.S.-Russian relations “on the brink of collapse.”
There’s nothing wrong with a little throwback tune, even if it might not ever be a big hit.
Parker McCollumhopped on social media this week to play an unreleased song for fans, with the caveat that they might not ever see it on a studio album.
“I’ve done everything that I can/ It don’t matter where it lands / Ain’t a damn thing I can do/ Heads you win, tails I lose,” Parker sings, strumming his acoustic guitar along to the mournful ballad.
It’s a sad tune that sounds like it’s from another era, but the singer says he won’t ever stop writing throwback ballads.
“I still try all the time to write songs that sound like the ones I grew up loving. Just sad old country songs,” he muses in a note that accompanies the video. “Wade Bowen and the Warren Brothers stopped [by] the house yesterday and we messed around with this one. Probably won’t ever make it on an album but I still love it.”
Next up, Parker’s got plans to join Thomas Rhett on his Bring the Bar Tour this summer. In personal news, he and his fiancée, Hallie Ray Light, will tie the knot this month.
Anthony Mackie, known for his role as Falcon in the Marvel films, has purchased 20 acres of land that he plans to utilize for a film and television studio.
Nola.com reports the 43-year-old actor closed on the deal earlier this month, on the Interstate 10 Service Road at Read Boulevard in New Orleans, Louisiana, the actor’s hometown.
New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell expressed her excitement for the development — and for the influx of jobs that’ll come as a result — in a tweet saying, “The New Orleans East is making a comeback, bam.”
The scope of the plan is not clear as of yet, Nola.com states.
Sum 41 has announced a new album called Heaven and Hell.
The project is a double record consisting of two halves: Heaven, which will be made up of pop-punk songs the “Fat Lip” rockers are known for, and Hell, which will be all metal.
Speaking to Rolling Stone about the two-part album, frontman Deryck Whibley explains that Heaven reflects the “young and innocent and free” feeling of pop-punk, while the darker Hell “comes with a lot of anger for people who have stolen from me and hurt me in the past.”
A release date for Heaven and Hell has yet to be announced. It’ll be the follow-up to 2019’s Order in Decline.
In the meantime, you can buy tickets for Sum 41’s Blame Canada tour with fellow north-of-the-border band Simple Plan, which launches on April 29 in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Mariah Carey & Morgan Carey in 1990; Barry King/WireImage
Mariah Carey‘s brother is currently suing her for defamation, but now Mariah has hit back with her own counterclaim, the New York Post reports.
Morgan Carey sued Mariah last year, accusing her of making false claims about him in her best-selling memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey. Now, the Post reports that, according to papers filed on Tuesday in Manhattan Supreme Court, Mariah is seeking to have her brother pay her legal fees.
In the papers, Mariah says she’s likely to win the case because, according to the filing, the parts of the book that Morgan claims are libelous are “true or substantially true.” What’s more, whatever Mariah said about Morgan wasn’t published “with actual malice” — a legal standard that has to be met to prove defamation.
The Post notes that last month, a judge tossed out the majority of Morgan’s claims, finding that most of what Mariah wrote about him was “opinion and exaggeration,” which doesn’t count as defamation. The remaining claims concern Mariah writing that Morgan, 62, was a drunk who sold drugs, assaulted their mother, and once hired a hitman.
