As the fallout continued over the disqualification of world number one Novak Djokovic, and the French Open outlined contentious plans to allow spectators in Paris, the tennis world hunkered down for more action from the US Open, where life in the New York bubble entered its second week. On the court the major stories were Naomi Osaka‘s trailblazing activism and Serena Williams’ quest for a 24th Grand Slam title, while the men’s side was guaranteed a new Grand Slam champion, with a slew of next generation talent striving to compete. Serena avenged herself against Maria Sakkari and ousted the returning Tsvetana Pironkova as she battled her way through to the semi-finals, setting up the tantalising prospect of a climax versus Osaka in a rematch from 2018. Victoria Azarenka however was displaying some of the finest form of her storied career, as following success at the Western & Southern Open, she stormed through to the semis with a 6-1, 6-0 rout of Elise Mertens.
In an historic clash between the sport’s most illustrious mothers, Azarenka held her nerve to oust Serena in three sets. Osaka meanwhile overcame the American outsiders Shelby Rogers and Jennifer Brady en route to the final, where both women would compete to win their third Grand Slams. Azarenka came agonisingly close to causing an upset, after striking in the first set and earning an early break in the second, but in the end it was Osaka who slumped to the ground in celebration, a victory marked equally across the United States and her native Japan. The wide open men’s draw saw talented youngsters like FĆ©lix Auger-Aliassime and Denis Shapovalov gradually fall by the wayside, in favour of wiser heads and players perennially on the cusp of success. In the semi-finals Alexander Zverev completed his first five-set comeback to beat Pablo CarreƱo Busta, while Dominic Thiem edged out last year’s runner-up Daniil Medvedev.
The final was an inevitably cagey affair which through trials and tribulations and the tentativeness of both competitors, eventually emerged as a sort of strained epic. This was the first Grand Slam final for Zverev, while Thiem was desperate for success at the fourth time of asking, after thrice departing Grand Slam finals as runner-up. Eventually Thiem triumphed at the end of a fifth-set tiebreak, heralding a hatful of firsts: his first Grand Slam title and the first Grand Slam won by a male born in the 1990s, the first US Open decided by a fifth-set tiebreak, while Thiem became the first player in the Open Era to rally in a US Open final from two sets down. Tennis moves on swiftly to Rome and then Paris, with a rescheduled French Open on the clay of Roland Garros. While France will welcome a fuller complement of players, including Rafael Nadal and more of the women’s top ten, world number one and reigning champion Ashleigh Barty will be absent, citing disrupted preparation and the ongoing health risks.
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Hard hits and the odd Hail Mary characterised an unusually turbulent NFL offseason, and there were plenty of fumbles and scrambles for short and long-yard gains. Anticipation ahead of the new season began as always with the NFL Draft, this year forced indoors thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, with commissioner Roger Goodell announcing the picks from the confines of his Bronxville basement. Punctuated by a litany of tragedies no less novel than the virus, the draft saw quarterback Joe Burrow of Louisiana State University selected first by the Cincinnati Bengals. As teams plumped for tough tacklers and sprightly wide receivers and shook things up at quarterback, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were busy crafting a team of wily veterans, luring Rob Gronkowski out of retirement to reunite with Tom Brady as the Patriots legends sought Super Bowls in pastures new.
Brady and Gronkowski to the Bucs nestled among other eye-catching and sometimes eyebrow-raising trades and free agency moves. The quarterback carousel saw Cam Newton fill the gap in New England, while the Carolina Panthers sought a long-term replacement in the form of outstanding backup Teddy Bridgewater from the New Orleans Saints. The Houston Texans traded star receiver DeAndre Hopkins plus a fourth-round pick to the Arizona Cardinals for a couple of picks plus veteran running back David Johnson, in what was widely derided as one of the worst swaps of all time. The Texans bet on Randall Cobb and Brandin Cooks as replacements, while the Jacksonville Jaguars conducted a six-month fire sale as A.J. Bouye, Calais Campbell, Nick Foles, Yannick Ngakoue, and Leonard Fournette were let go. Some teams cared to hold on to their star players, most notably the reigning Super Bowl champions, the Kansas City Chiefs, who secured Patrick Mahomes on a record-breaking ten-year contract extension worth up to $503 million. That deal reset the market for quarterbacks, exemplified by the big-money deal struck between Houston and Deshaun Watson, while the saga of contract negotiations between Dak Prescott and the Dallas Cowboys rumbled on.
The pandemic saw sixty-six players opt out of the 2020 NFL season, while concussions and other ailments wrought early retirement for Travis Frederick, Luke Kuechly, and Aqib Talib. Beyond injuries and illnesses the NFL struggled to contend with social upheaval, as in the wake of widespread protests over police brutality, players asked the organisation to respect the value of black lives, while the team formerly known as the Washington Redskins belatedly agreed to a name change. Finally after all the fuss, riding roughshod over all the obstacles, on the back of a foreshortened preseason, the new football season commenced. Replete with artificial crowd noise and a reduced number of spectators, following a show of unity met in some quarters by jeers, the Chiefs saw off the Texans with a 34-20 victory on opening day. While Brady struggled, star quarterbacks Russell Wilson of the Seattle Seahawks and Lamar Jackson of the Baltimore Ravens soared, with Cam Newton doing enough to suggest that there may be life yet in New England.
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In early June, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences unveiled Academy Aperture 2025, the latest push towards increased diversity at the Oscars and across the film industry. Fixing the number of nominees for the prestigious Best Picture award at ten, confirming new Board of Governors term limits, the Academy also gathered a group of industry leaders tasked with devising new standards for Oscars eligibility.
Announced this week, from 2022 aspiring films must submit a confidential Academy Inclusion Standards form to be eligible for Best Picture. From 2024, films submitting for Best Picture must meet two of four inclusion standards, covering on-screen representation, creative leadership, industry access, and audience development. Beyond the inevitable outrage and presumptive death knells for cinema, the new standards are fairly tempered, effectively ensuring a measure of representation somewhere along the supply chain for women, minority ethnic groups, LGBTQ+ people, and people with disabilities. That representation can come in all manner of forms: from star names and supporting roles in front of the camera, through diverse themes and storytelling, in the creative department from key roles to the overall composition of the crew, or in the makeup of companies responsible for distribution and marketing.
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Last November, LVMH MoĆ«t Hennessy Louis Vuitton announced plans for the acquisition of Tiffany & Company, adding iconic robin egg blue and visions of Audrey Hepburn eating pĆ¢tisserie to an already lustrous stable of brands including MoĆ«t & Chandon, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Givenchy, and Bulgari. Worth more than $16 billion, the deal was set to become the largest ever struck in the luxury sector, boosting the profile of LVMH in the United States while Tiffany glanced longingly towards the Chinese market and social media. From eggshell blue to the mean reds, now the deal has hit the rocks, with LVMH pulling the plug amid the coronavirus pandemic. Opting to withdraw from the agreement, LVMH specifically cited a request from the French government asking to delay the deal in the face of impending American tariffs. Casting a sceptical eye over the Atlantic, already bruised by the global downturn and now having to reckon with a reduced price or another buyer, Tiffany intends to sue in an attempt to bring the sale to completion.
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In another alarm call for the shared future of our planet, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London this week released the biennial Living Planet Report, warning that as a result of human activity, biodiversity is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate. The Living Planet Report is based on the Living Planet Index and Ecological Footprint calculations, gathering data on population trends in vertebrates to show an average rate of change. According to the Living Planet Report 2020, global animal populations declined by an average of 68 percent between 1970 and 2016, hastened by changing land-use patterns, overconsumption, pollution, the introduction of invasive species to native habitats, and extreme weather events allied to climate change.
The Living Planet Report tallies data on 20,811 populations representing 4,392 vertebrate species, covering threatened and non-threatened species, from tigers, pandas, and polar bears to freshwater amphibians, reptiles, and fish. The starkest change has occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean, which shows an average decline of 94 percent in vertebrate populations, driven by the conversion of grasslands, savannahs, forests, and wetlands, overexploitation, and disease. The report makes plain the symbiotic relationship between human health and biodiversity, noting that habitat loss and the trade in wild animals impacts our food security while pushing together some of the vectors liable to cause pandemics. But while stressing the extent to which humans outspend the planet’s biocapacity, the report also outlines a roadmap for ‘bending the curve of biodiversity loss’, advocating an end to deforestation and the expansion of protected areas, alongside more sustainable consumption as part of shifting agricultural habits from farm to fork.
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Toots Hibbert, the pioneering reggae musician who imbued his songs with communal spirit and upbeat soul, died on Friday at 77 years old. Born to Seventh-day Adventist preachers as the youngest of seven children, by his teens Hibbert had moved to the Trench Town neighbourhood in the Jamaican capital of Kingston. A talented multi-instrumentalist with a background in gospel music, he formed The Maytals as a vocal trio in 1961. Charting a course between ska and rocksteady, citing the influence of American soul singers like Otis Redding and James Brown, The Maytals recorded with the producers Coxsone Dodd, Prince Buster, Byron Lee, and Leslie Kong as Jamaican music flourished in the sixties, emerging as one of the country’s most popular local acts. Increasingly melding religious themes with urban commentary, in 1966 The Maytals won the inaugural Jamaica Independence Festival Popular Song Competition for ‘Bam Bam’. An eighteen-month prison sentence for marijuana possession momentarily halted the band’s progression, but when Hibbert returned The Maytals scored another hit with ’54-46 That’s My Number’, covering his time in jail.
The 1968 song ‘Do the Reggay’ is widely credited for coining the name of the new genre, as The Maytals added scattershot vocal harmonies and elements of gospel, funk, and soul to the slowed-down groove of rocksteady. In 1969 they released some of reggae’s defining early compositions, including the urgent and exhorting ‘Pressure Drop’ and ‘Sweet and Dandy’, which won another Popular Song Competition. In 1970, The Maytals scored their first international hit, as ‘Monkey Man’ landed on the singles chart in the United Kingdom. By the early seventies the group had become known as Toots and the Maytals, with Hibbert fronting a roving band of instrumentalists and background musicians. When The Harder They Come hit cinemas in the United States in early 1973, featuring The Maytals with ‘Sweet and Dandy’ and ‘Pressure Drop’ on the soundtrack, reggae was well on its way to international recognition. Catch a Fire and Burnin’ by Bob Marley and the Wailers were released to critical acclaim in the United States, followed by rave reviews in 1975 when Toots and the Maytals revised and reissued their album Funky Kingston.
Toots and the Maytals disbanded in the early eighties, the climax of Hibbert’s solo period the 1988 album Toots in Memphis, which mined the classics of sixties soul. By the mid-nineties he was back heading up a reformulated Maytals. In 2004, True Love gathered some of the group’s classic songs performed alongside celebrity admirers like No Doubt, The Roots, and Keith Richards, winning Toots and the Maytals a Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album. A documentary film and frequent covers and samples helped Toots and the Maytals maintain a lively touring schedule, punctuated in 2013 when Hibbert suffered a head injury after a bottle was thrown onstage. Toots and the Maytals performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2018, and had just released their latest album Got to Be Tough at the time of Hibbert’s passing. His death at the University Hospital of the West Indies in Kingston was confirmed in a family statement, and while no cause was specified, Hibbert had recently been admitted to intensive care following a test for coronavirus. Fans, friends, and collaborators from Ziggy Marley and Chris Blackwell to Mick Jagger and Willie Nelson paid fond tribute.
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Hotly anticipated heading into the Venice International Film Festival, as the world of cinema gathered for the first time since the onset of the global coronavirus pandemic replete with thermal scanners and swab tests, the film Nomadland emerged at the end of proceedings to win the Golden Lion, the festival’s highest honour. Starring Frances McDormand and written and directed by ChloĆ© Zhao, the film portrays the itinerant travels of a woman who in the wake of industrial turmoil embarks on a road trip through the American Midwest. Heralded for its poetic landscapes and the raw intimacy of McDormand’s performance, premiering simultaneously on Friday in Venice and Toronto, Nomadland makes Zhao the first female director to win big at Venice since Sofia Coppola for Somewhere in 2010, and the first woman of colour to take the top prize since Mira Nair for Monsoon Wedding in 2001. Gender equality remained one of the festival’s warmest topics, with Cate Blanchett heading the jury as Venice boasted eight female filmmakers out of the eighteen films shown in competition.
The Grand Jury Prize went to Mexican director Michel Franco for the art dystopia New Order, while the Silver Lion went to Japan’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa for Wife of a Spy. The opening weekend belonged to Vanessa Kirby, who starred with Shia LaBeouf in KornĆ©l MundruczĆ³’s Pieces of a Woman and alongside Katherine Waterston and Casey Affleck in Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come, for the former taking home the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. The men’s award meanwhile went to Italian veteran Pierfrancesco Favino for the lead role in Padrenostro, a coming-of-age drama by Claudio Noce. The Disciple by Chaitanya Tamhane – the first Indian film shown in competition at Venice since Monsoon Wedding – received the award for best screenplay, while the Special Jury Prize went to Dear Comrades! by Andrei Konchalovsky, a drama in black and white about the Novocherkaskk Massacre of 1962. The Duke starring Jim Broadbent as an unlikely art thief and Apples by Greek New Wave director Christos Nikou received early buzz, before Regina King appeared by video to present One Night in Miami, the first film directed by an African-American woman in the history of the fest.
