Like stories about how much everyone still loves Friends – could it be any more necessary to talk about how everyone still loves Friends? – Jennifer Lopez is everywhere. Last week, she was announced as co-headliner of the next Super Bowl half-time show, sharing that 100 million or so strong audience with Shakira. In a statement, she said it was a lifelong dream. “And now it’s made even more special not only because it’s the NFL’s 100th anniversary but also because I am performing with a fellow Latina. I can’t wait to show what us girls can do on the world’s biggest stage.”
Lopez is enjoying a career renaissance of epic proportions. In a way, epic proportions are a big part of her story in the first place. She closed the Versace show during Milan fashion week with a revival of “that” green dress, 20 years after she wore it to the Grammys. So many people searched for it back then that it led Google to the creation of Google Images. She is also receiving that much-coveted Oscars buzz – not a bad turnaround for the woman who once uttered: “It’s turkey time! Gobble gobble, gobble,” widely considered the worst movie dialogue of all time – for Hustlers. She plays a blinder as Ramona Vega, a stripper turned con artist who either wants to wrap everyone up in her giant fur coat or drug them and fleece them, depending on which side of the transactions they are on. I went to see Hustlers the weekend it came out. I can’t remember the last time I sat in a cinema filled, and it was filled, almost entirely with young women. My friend Louis audibly gasped when J-Lo performed her pièce de résistance, a gravity-caressing pole dance to Fiona Apple’s song Criminal. He grabbed my hand and whispered: “She’s 50.” Nobody shushed him.
Apple herself gave her blessing to Hustlers in an interview this week. “I would give my song to Jennifer Lopez to dance to for free, any day, any time,” she told Vulture. She also shared an anecdote about how, in the 1990s, she saw Lopez knocking a glass of champagne over with her behind, and not even noticing. “It was glorious.”
Such is the ubiquity of Lopez right now that people are unearthing old interviews, as if nothing can satisfy the ravenous appetite for J-Lo. A 1998 chat has gone viral, thanks to her blunt assessments of Cameron Diaz, Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna. There is something old-Hollywood about this glorious, carefree resurgence, and I love it.
Jesse Armstrong: For Fox sake, don’t swear like the president
In among Jodie Comer deciding not to invite her parents to the Emmys, because she thought it wasn’t her time to win best drama actress (it was), and Ben Whishaw accepting his award by confessing to a hangover, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge winning practically every other award and then breaking the internet with a candid shot of her smoking a fag and drinking a cocktail, and everyone declaring that Chernobyl was basically British because most people in it were British, there was another Brit in the “Brits take over television” mix that night.
The wonderful Jesse Armstrong won the outstanding writing on a drama series award for Succession. If he had not, frankly, it would have been an outrage, as the first-season finale is one of the best TV episodes in a very long time. Its brilliant but terrible wedding made every Christmas EastEnders look like it should have been on CBeebies. And it contained the line “I’m Shiv fucking Roy”, which, let’s face it, is probably the main reason why Armstrong won.
Collecting the award, he said: “Quite a lot of British winners. Maybe too many? Maybe you should have a think about those immigration restrictions for shithole countries?” At least, I think that’s what he said, because “shithole countries” was muted. He was silenced, most likely, because he said the S-word, okay for a president but not broadcast television. Even so, given how cynical Succession is about its family-owned media empire forced to resist the constant criticism that it poisons the well of public discourse, the fact that Armstrong was bleeped by Fox was delicious.
Mark Ronson: ‘Coming out’ wasn’t so clever
Poor Mark Ronson, who was recently nudged into saying he identified as a “sapiosexual” on Good Morning Britain, after the show had just aired a discussion about it (in a way, he’s lucky that’s all they were talking about that day). A sapiosexual, for those who didn’t catch the segment, is someone attracted to intellect, which is a bit of a humblebrag.
Ronson was caught between a rock and a hard Kate Garraway when it came to a response: if he’d said no, he didn’t care if women were smart or dumb, as long as they were pretty, I don’t think he would have been much better off.
Still, in yet another sign of Twitter’s unrestrained loopiness, there was a backlash. Ronson had to walk back his coming out as a sapiosexual, even though anyone watching would have considered it a tepid and slightly baffled coming out, at best.
“It sounds like I went on a TV show to be like, ‘Guys, I have some big news!’,” he told Rolling Stone magazine.
“I would like to come out properly and say that I do not consider myself part of any marginalised community and I apologise if anybody misunderstood or took offence.”
• Rebecca Nicholson is an Observer columnist
