Dejana

Joaquin Phoenix for Joker, someone who was seen as "due" for a win, and the Academy really liked the movie. I think Adam Driver is highly respected and has a good chance of winning an Oscar in the next five years.

I think it was one of those "It's their time" Oscars. She also had a supporting role in Little Women last year, she'd had many strong performances in her career and sometimes people vote for a body of work. I think Laura Dern was one of those actors where it wasn't quite considered a travesty of acting that she hadn't won already, but the idea of her being an Oscar winner seemed reasonable. I did like that she won and it wasn't for a supportive wife/mother or a "hooker with a heart of gold" role that's typical for the Supporting Actress category.

I loved Rosie in the role and her real-life rapport with Madonna really showed, but I think Jane would have worked as well.

Who knows? Maybe if Clare hadn't clicked so strongly with Dale she might have been more open to "the process" with the other guys. Or she might have stayed shut up in her room. I don't think she handled the situation absolutely perfectly, but still it's just a reality show, they have contingency plans, and most contestants will ultimately get rejected even when the lead does play the usual game. From that article: Of course.

In a season promo, when a male voice is heard, the closed captions attribute his words to a "Josh Bourelle", the name of Tayshia's ex-husband. This show has sprung ex-boyfriends on the leads before, so an ex-spouse would be in character for TPTB (though incredibly low).

Who knows what the future holds? But I think they seem sweet together. Maybe they rushed the timeline, but that means Dale won't watch back the season and get mad about Clare doing "fiancé things" with other guys on the show.

When's the latest that a musical guest has been announced, prior to the show? Are they just going to surprise us at this point?

A new episode for November 7 has been added:

Here's Adele's post about the news, which confirms that she is hosting and not the musical guest: * Sometimes it's the hosts people are skeptical about, who end up being pleasant surprises. Adele did a sketch for an album special and played an Adele impersonator: Adele has a good sense of sense of humor about herself, which shouldn't hurt in a format like SNL's.

Adele as a host next week, not the musical guest. Interesting...

Bachelorette Alum Emily Maynard Johnson Welcomes Her Fifth Child — a Baby Girl! She'd just announced the pregnancy a day ago. Emily always said she wanted a lot of kids. It's so interesting to see how her life has turned out and compare it to where Brad and Jef are now. Even with Arie, he's married with a family, too, but I don’t think he and Emily would have worked out in the long run.

It's hard to know what is real on those Boot Camp shows vs exaggerated for TV. Sean Lowe said he and Catherine just did it for the money. Obviously since Ashley and JP are splitting up, they had issues.

That's fair. At this point, Clare and Dale are probably going to maintain that there was no contact, since that's their story (and it may very well be the truth, besides). In this case, the show seems to be loving the drama, but they could just as easily have come down hard and banished them from Bachelor Nation for not "respecting the process".

Since Clare had such an intense reaction to Dale on Night 1, it might have occurred to TPTB that their season could be affected if the Bachelorette's F1 was impossible to hide. In the before times, this was easy enough to disguise with all the travel, private concerts, celebrity guests, etc. Maybe TPTB started early with the contingency plans. Clare admits that she did check out her contestants online ahead of time. Dale is on social media, he used to play football and has done some events with the Special Olympics. It's not impossible that Clare developed a huge crush just based on what she saw of him online, and meeting him confirmed the positive impressions she already had. I remember an episode of Boy Meets World where the guy found a lost purse and fell for the girl just based on the contents. That was a sitcom but you can see/learn a lot more than that about a person from their Instagram, if they're the type to put themselves out there. The show is acknowledging that one of the guys contacted her before filming. Why hide it with Dale? He and Clare look like bigger flakes for getting engaged after 12 days, if they weren't in contact first. Maybe communicating before the season would be "cheating" but who ever said the show is fair? If they did communicate first, the smart thing would be for the show not to address whether this happened with any of the contestants.

Ashley's post uses the same photo but a different caption: JP was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome but was recovering. I was thinking more in the sense that health problems can be stressful, and even if you recover, it can alter your perspective on life. But after seeing both their captions, I wonder if their differences might have been political. I won't elaborate but we live in a very polarized time. Of course, it could just be that one of them wants to shill on Instagram more than the other...

Pretty shocking news. Sometimes serious illness makes people figure life is too short.

I am familiar with the spoilers and that's not what they mean (Bachelorette spoilers below) : But when every season is "the most shocking ever" and the franchise's overall track record with diversity record is terrible, people are going to figure the show is operating in bad faith. Similarly, people looked askance at Matt James being announced as the first Black Bachelor this summer, and said ABC was only picked him because of the Bachelor Diversity Campaign and the Black Lives Matter movement. I'm sure those were factors, but he was originally going to be part of this Bachelorette season that was supposed to start filming in March. When the cast got announced, fans wondered if Matt was really there as an audition to be the next Bachelor, as the show has overwhelmingly picked runners up of a prior season as the next lead. The producers felt that the audience would be more invested to watch the new "journey" of someone they'd gotten to know vs. some random person who was supposedly a great catch. From a ratings standpoint, it makes sense to turn your reality dating franchise into an interconnected soap opera. The problem of that approach with respect to racial diversity was that most leads were white and primarily attracted to other white people, so the non-white contestants generally didn't get as much airtime. They often only lasted a few weeks into the season, lowering their odds to be the next Bachelor/ette, based on the show's criteria. That's not to say that even within that limited framework, the show didn't have their chances over the years to be more diverse than they were, and declined.

I think it depends on the show/network, whether I want them to acknowledge Covid or not. Hallmark showed a movie last month that was made earlier in the summer. It had a lot of outdoor scenes and some of the extras were unusually inert (as they were mannequins) but it was not a world in a pandemic. I think that approach is fine for the sort of PG, escapist romantic comedy that is Hallmark's bread and butter, though they could have movies ending with cutesy Zoom weddings, too. I never thought a socially distanced awards show would mean traveling presenters in tuxedo hazmat suits to hand out the Emmys (or take them away, if you lose):

The franchise was able to move on from that because it wasn't Corinne going to the police about DeMario. The show could say some producer overreacted and there's no tape out there to contradict that point of view. A former Bachelor having a restraining order filed by his final choice on the show... The legal system is already involved and there's evidence available to the public. If Colton goes for some sort of treatment and never bothers Cassie again, TPTB may be able to get away with saying the bare minimum about this. If it escalates even further... * It's not really a competition. Gia's death is sad, as is the untimely death of any former contestant. My point was more about the show's culpability in pushing a one-sided relationship that has since turned toxic. Colton made his own choices after the season ended, but got major reinforcement on the idea that he deserved Cassie's love regardless of her feelings about it. The Colton/Cassie situation isn't over yet. Stories like this often end very badly. * Even after the restraining order news broke, Colton (or something close to him) was still trying to make himself look like the good guy in the media ("She's talking to her ex. She didn't stay with him 4ever and ever, even after he had Covid!"), while not actually denying the substance of the allegations. It says a lot about his mindset concerning Cassie, none of it good.

Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate was pretty entertaining, though our heroine was entirely too trusting. The personal chef tried to warn her, but she was broke and naive. How much work is someone even doing as the personal chef for a vacation house? And that celebrity couple was wild! I guess it's okay on a Lifetime movie to show someone shooting up between their toes, as long as you don't say what's being taken? Her Deadly Sugar Daddy premieres tonight!

Cassie seems like a people pleaser and Colton's actions on the show were sold as romantic. He was a nice guy who was really into her, and she was somewhat attracted to him, so she gave things a shot. She could probably tell he was the type to take a breakup very badly (not that she could anticipate this, but he seems very clingy), so she put it off. Even now, his defenders are saying she should be more accommodating, he's just brokenhearted, and why did she have to go embarrass him by making all this public? Ugh. * Reality Steve said he heard the show was Colton's idea that he introduced to Cassie, that it hadn't been picked up by a network, not much had been filmed and her family wasn't involved. Cassie's sister also posted that she and her parents hadn't signed any contracts or spoken to any PTB from this supposed show. And Cassie backed out, apparently, not him. It now seems like it was Colton's delusional way of trying to stay in her life. * A breakdown of the restraining order details: Colton's fake stalker texts to himself...projecting much? It's all of his worst thoughts about himself, out loud: you're too square/awkward, she needs a bad boy, her family never liked you. * I really wonder how the show is going to address this. Will TPTB hide behind it being a legal matter and just never reference Colton's season again? It would be awful for any Bachelor breakup to escalate into stalking, but it's one thing if they'd seemed like a perfectly happy couple on their season. In this case, the show encouraged Colton in not taking Cassie's "no" for an answer from the start, which only fueled a dynamic that only got unhealthier from there.

Chris Harrison narrates: "We first met Tayshia on Season 23 of The Bachelor [cut to: solo shot of Tayshia]. Although she didn't find a match, she gave love another chance in Paradise..." It sucks for Tayshia, who already isn't getting the usual lead spotlight.

I really liked Elf, but it's probably for the best that a sequel never happened.

I wonder how Tayshia's time on Colton's season is going to be addressed now. It was her introduction to the franchise and she was his Top 3, but... At least TPTB can focus on Paradise?

Reality Steve has Jason and Molly on his podcast for the first time. They were the first big Bachelor story he spoiled: He writes about Cassie and Colton in his column and discusses it on the episode a bit. Steve now says he thinks Colton reached out to him to appear on the podcast this summer as preemptive damage control. He's hearing the reality show they were supposedly doing about the breakup was Colton's idea and Cassie backed out of it. The full temporary restraining order is online, including screencaps of all the incriminating texts Colton sent to Cassie and her family/friends. It didn't leak: as Reality Steve pointed out, anyone who creates an online account with the LA court system and pays the fee for the document (under $15, I believe) can download the whole 20+ page thing for themselves. There's a link to it TheBachelor Reddit and probably other places on social media where the franchise is discussed.