It launched the careers of Jesse Plemons and Michael B Jordan, and let its stars improvise in a way that was fresh and new. This show about smalltown US football was confident, trailblazing – and wonderful

I’ve been around the south of the US enough to have seen the importance of football: little burgs where the high-school football field has stands that wouldn’t disgrace a League Two soccer club in the UK. Friday Night Lights, which was first broadcast 20 years ago, is set in the most fervent edges of that world, smalltown Texas, where what happens under the floodlights at the end of the working week defines the mood of the place for days to come.

Britt Daniel, the frontman of the Texas band Spoon, grew up in one such town, Temple. “Friday Night Lights is based on Odessa, and Odessa and Temple are very, very similar,” he told me in 2017. “The high schools used to play each other at football, and they’re the kind of towns where everything happens on Friday because it’s the football game. I didn’t really think about it until many years later, but you really risked being beaten [up]. Not just harassed, but beaten. Everywhere you went, you really had to look over your shoulder. If you were at the mall, if you were at the parking lot, if you were at a party – people really wanted to fight.”

Images of two actors on front of Vogue and GQ land at a time when masculinity is increasingly dominating headlines

Tom Cruise and Michael B Jordan share many similarities as box-office powerhouses known for their death-defying action hero stunts. But this week the two stars went head-to-head, or more accurately chest-to-chest, on magazine stands.

In one corner there’s 64-year-old Cruise on the cover of GQ, his first for the magazine in 20 years. Posing in an unbuttoned shirt, one hand running through his tousled hair, the other gripping his belt buckle, this is Cruise playing the role of sexy Cruise.

Oscar winner set to produce, and possibly star in, film of war game series with Christopher McQuarrie at the helm

Michael B Jordan is following up his Oscar win with the announcement of another new project: a big-screen adaptation of the hit video game series Battlefield.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the Sinners star will produce, and possibly star in, a film based on the long-running war series which is being hyped as the year’s most in-demand project to date in Hollywood

What is it like to be Michael B Jordan’s twin, Andie MacDowell’s hands or Rachel Weisz’s hair? Some of Hollywood’s best stand-ins reveal all

Most of us are familiar with the idea of stunt doubles in film and television. But there are plenty of other doubles working in the industry, too – for when an actor doesn’t want to do an intimate scene, for example, or doesn’t have the skills required to show their character playing an instrument or driving a car. Here, six body doubles talk about their secret lives on screen.

From The Wire to Fruitvale Station, Creed, Black Panther, the Academy award winner has amassed a body of work that straddles commercial and critical success
• Oscar winners 2026: the full list
• Sinners’ Oscar triumphs show that Black cinema is now a vital and valid part of Hollywood

Michael B Jordan’s best actor Oscar places him in an exclusive club. Only five black actors have won the award before. He now sits on a list that includes Will Smith, Jamie Foxx, Forest Whitaker, Denzel Washington and Sidney Poitier, the first black winner for Lilies of the Field in 1964.

But less than a month ago, it seemed unlikely. Jordan’s success at the Actors awards was the first serious hint that he could beat Timothée Chalamet, who had won at the Golden Globes and was the frontrunner for much of the awards campaign. But Chalamet, who made a few missteps on the campaign trail, was up against one of the most well-loved actors operating in Hollywood. Jordan is someone who at only 39 years old has managed to amass a body of work that straddles commercial and critical success.

Its wins are a testament to Ryan Coogler’s vision. His highly personal film foregrounds the Black experience and its essential humanity is a lesson for us all
• Oscar winners 2026: the full list
• Key takeaways: horror wins, tech loses and politics is hard to ignore

Congratulations to the Sinners camp on its Oscar night triumphs – affirmation that cinema can be deep and entertaining at the same time. It might not have swept the major awards as some of us had hoped, but it is still a personal victory for Ryan Coogler, and also the validation that Black cinema has long been denied. And despite handling heavy themes of racist violence, Sinners will probably be remembered by history as a message of hope and unity in a turbulent era.

Nobody could argue that Coogler’s film didn’t deserve its success. Sinners is a complete, unified, all-round work of art. Everything seems to be in tune: the story, the performances (not least Michael B Jordan’s technically demanding dual role – justly rewarded with the best actor Oscar), the music, the costumes , the production design, the visuals (a boundary-smashing award for Autumn Durald Arkapaw – the first woman and the first Black winner of the best cinematography Oscar). Sinners’ record 16 nominations and four wins were confirmation that the Academy agreed.

While Academy voters are supposed to keep their picks secret, another batch of anonymous ballots have leaked – giving us some insight on a hard-to-call race

• Oscars 2026: how to watch, nominations, what to read and predictions

It took a great deal of blood, sweat and tweets, but in 2016 the Academy finally took notice and started to embrace both diversity and modernity. The #OscarsSoWhite furore over two straight years of all-white nominees (Michael B Jordan’s Creed snub was in my opinion the cruelest) led to a dramatic shake-up and one that has continued ever since with more women, people of colour and international voters added to what had been an overwhelmingly homogenous base.

It has all led to an Oscars race that is increasingly harder to predict using old-fashioned thinking in ways that have become rather thrilling over time, the idea of an “Oscar movie” now far more slippery. Films such as Parasite, Anora, Moonlight, Anatomy of a Fall, Nomadland, Get Out and The Zone of Interest have now found their way into the major categories in past years, and this year’s crop showcases further progression – from foreign language picks to outsider narratives to pricklier characters than ever before.

From Marty Supreme to One Battle After Another, this awards run has been populated by a harder-to-love group of spiky characters

Broadly speaking, the best way to get an acting Oscar is to play someone lovable, or someone lovably hateable. Not every acting winner fits that binary, of course, but the history of all four categories is filled with fascinatingly bad behavior (Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, Louise Fletcher in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, JK Simmons in Whiplash) as well as expressions of sheer delight at the combination of actor and lovable character (Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love). This year’s crop of acting nominees isn’t exactly short of rooting interests: Michael B Jordan makes his pair of 1930s gangsters charming twice over in Sinners while still distinguishing between their individual nuances, and Benicio del Toro’s even-keeled activist is highly lovable in One Battle After Another. Elsewhere, though, there’s definitely a stronger-than-usual strain of characters who defy the usual standards of easy likability.

The importance of likability in an Oscar campaign is akin to its importance in a political one – though in the case of the Academy awards, performers are campaigning twice, for themselves as actors and, essentially, for their characters as part of the cinematic firmament. That’s why likability is arguably the secret accelerant to the longtime trend of the awards going to actors playing real-life figures. It’s not just about a physical transformation or seamless impersonation, because many of those biographical performance aren’t really that when you put them side by side with the real thing. It’s that extra rooting interest that comes from embodying Freddie Mercury, Winston Churchill, Stephen Hawking, Abraham Lincoln, Judy Garland – people who Academy voters probably already like or admire to some degree, at least in the abstract. Suffering, too, can help create an easier sense of empathy.

Ryan Coogler’s artful action-horror offers superb performances, rich storytelling, historical detail – and a jook joint scene that tears the roof off

It’s a symptom of the modern entertainment landscape that movies are now either commercially successful or critically acclaimed, but rarely both. Look over the highest-grossing films of 2025 and it’s a familiar roll call of sequels and spin-offs; look over the critics’ favourites and they are mostly fine movies that not enough people watched – all hoping for a boost from awards season. But Sinners ticked both boxes: it was a smash hit (the seventh highest grossing picture in the US and virtually the only original movie in the top 20), and it was a critical triumph (97% on Rotten Tomatoes, 84% on Metacritic). And most importantly of all, Sinners was a true original, combining action-horror excitement with deep, rich, personal storytelling. There’s nothing more gratifying than seeing a film-maker swing for the fences and actually knock it out of the park; against expectations, 39-year-old Ryan Coogler did just that.

What’s more, Sinners contains what’s surely one of the most transcendently cinematic moments of the year: the scene when blues singer Preacher Boy (Miles Caton) performs his new song I Lied to You for a rowdy Mississippi jook joint, which is powerful enough to pierce “the veil between life and death, the past and the future”. As the song builds, reality breaks down. African tribal musicians, Chinese opera performers, modern-day turntablists, P-Funk-style electric guitarists: all join the swirling revelry. Coogler literally tears the roof off the joint: it catches fire from all this energy and we’re in another realm of space and time. Give the film an Oscar just for this!

The two-time Oscar winner on dressing Michael B Jordan’s twin antiheroes, her start with Spike Lee and crafting the period detail of Ryan Coogler’s genre-bending epic

Ruth E Carter’s costumes were a crucial part of establishing the identities of the two identical twins, both played by Michael B Jordan, in multi-Oscar-nominated Sinners. Particularly the hats. One brother, Stack, wore a red fedora. The other brother, Smoke, wore a blue newsboy flat cap. Finding the hats was a critical moment in the film’s backstory. When director Ryan Coogler first saw Jordan try on Stack’s red fedora, bought by Carter in Los Angeles’s Melrose Avenue, “he was like – that’s it. Then he goes up into the rest of the office, and people are coming down, like, ‘Ryan’s talking upstairs about a red hat?’ You know when you’ve hit it – it’s a transformation.”

This is just a small example of the canny period world-building that has made Carter the most-garlanded Black woman in Oscars history, and the owner of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (her family were in attendance, she says, of its Covid-era unveiling, while Oprah and Eddie Murphy dialled in via Zoom). Her work on Coogler’s genre-squashing, Jim Crow-era drama, which has gained a record-breaking 16 Oscar nods, has landed a fifth nomination for the two-time Oscar winner (she is, according to a poll by Variety, a favourite in the category). Among her starry upcoming projects: a biopic of the pioneering Black fashion designer, Ann Lowe – designer of Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress – which she will produce alongside Serena Williams.

The previously named Screen Actors Guild (Sag) awards also saw wins for the ensemble casts of Sinners and The Studio, while Harrison Ford took home lifetime achievement

• Actor awards 2026 red carpet – in pictures

Michael B Jordan, Jessie Buckley and the late Catherine O’Hara were among the big winners at this year’s newly titled Actor awards.

Previously known as the Screen Actors Guild awards, the Actors are voted on by a membership of more than 160,000 actors. The name change was to provide “clearer recognition in terms of what the show is about”.

Lindo speaks out after man with Tourette syndrome shouted slur while actor was on stage with Michael B Jordan

British-American actor Delroy Lindo expressed gratitude for “the support and love” he and Michael B Jordan have received after a man with Tourette syndrome (TS) shouted the N-word as the two men presented a Bafta award.

“We appreciate all the support and love that we have been shown,” Lindo – who, like Jordan, is Black – said on stage at the annual NAACP Image awards in Los Angeles. He called it “a classic case of something that could be very negative becoming very positive”.

By failing to remove John Davidson’s tic from the broadcast, editors let down both black and disabled people

I attended the Bafta awards on Sunday. And I arrived early enough to hear the Tourette syndrome (TS) campaigner John Davidson, on whom the biographical film I Swear is based, be introduced. He stood up to wave and take in the applause, and we were told that due to his TS, we might expect to hear involuntary vocal outbursts, known as tics, and that we should understand that the Baftas are an inclusive space in which all people are welcome.

Perhaps half the people were listening, others would have been on their phones or engaged in mild chatter. But the tics were instantly audible. When the host, Alan Cumming, was on stage we heard “boring” and there was laughter. When the outgoing chair of Bafta, Sara Putt, was speaking, we heard “shut the fuck up” and there was a mix of knowing silence and confusion. But, as you all now know, it was when Sinners actors Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo presented an award that the tics transmuted from things that would be read as benignly antisocial to more outright offensive, as we heard the N-word. There were gasps and whispers of “did he just say … ?”

Jason Okundaye is an assistant Opinion editor at the Guardian

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Chief content officer Kate Phillips tells staff she is ‘so sorry’ racial slur by Tourette campaigner was not edited from recorded broadcast

Peter Bradshaw: why the dust has not yet settled on the Baftas N-word row

A senior BBC executive has apologised to staff for the corporation’s failure to edit a racial slur from Sunday’s Bafta film awards telecast. In a note sent on Tuesday and seen by the Press Association, chief content officer Kate Phillips told staff she was “so sorry that a racial slur was not edited out of our broadcast” and that she understood “how distressing this was”.

Tourette syndrome campaigner John Davidson could be heard shouting the N-word as Sinners stars Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo presented the award for special visual effects at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

Film-maker Jonte Richardson cites ‘harm inflicted on both the black and disabled communities’, while New Black Film Collective and MP Dawn Butler criticise BBC’s failure to edit

• BBC apologises to staff over N-word inclusion as Bafta announces comprehensive review

• Sinners studio say they raised N-word use with Bafta immediately as Google ‘deeply sorry’ for offensive notification

• Peter Bradshaw: the dust has not yet settled on the Baftas N-word row. This is why

A black British film-maker has said he will step down as a Bafta judge over the organisation’s handling of the incident during Sunday’s ceremony during which a Tourette syndrome campaigner shouted a racial slur while two black actors were on stage.

Sinners stars Delroy Lindo and Michael B Jordan were presenting the award for special visual effects when John Davidson, whose life story was adapted into the acclaimed film I Swear, shouted the N-word from the stalls. The actors continued with their presenting duties but appeared shocked.

A source close to Warner Bros has said that executives were assured the slur would be removed before broadcast, while search engine remove AI-generated prompt

• BBC apologises to staff over N-word inclusion as Bafta announces comprehensive review
• Bafta judge quits over ‘utterly unforgivable’ handling of N-word incident
• The dust has not yet settled on the Baftas N-word row. This is why

Warner Bros reacted immediately after the N-word was yelled while two of the black stars of their film, Sinners, were on stage at the Baftas on Sunday night, yet saw their concerns ignored after the moment was not edited out of the TV broadcast.

A source close to the studio has told the Guardian that executives immediately raised the issue with Bafta after Tourette syndrome campaigner John Davidson’s verbal tic while Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo were presenting the award for best visual effects.

This year’s Baftas were a chaotic mix of wild praise and inadvertent insults as the best actor prize was won by an unknown – and one of the nominees seemingly slurred from a man in the stalls

• How the night unfolded

• Peter Bradshaw’s verdict on the Baftas’ winners and losers

• News: One Battle After Another defeats Hamnet and Sinners as Robert Aramayo takes best actor

Going into Bafta night, everybody’s secret hopes for a little British movies that could were pinned on folkie comedy The Ballad of Wallis Island. In the event though, Ballad wound up with nothing and I Swear, about Tourettes activist John Davidson stormed the show, capped by a jawdropping win for Robert Aramayo in the best actor category. As the man himself said, it was not to be believed that he’d be heading to the podium ahead of the likes of DiCaprio, Chalamet and Ethan Hawke. You probably have to go back to the mid-1980s and Haing S Ngor’s win for The Killing Fields for someone so unheralded to take the prize.

Few UK nominations this year as industry tries to balance attracting global attention and celebrating homegrown projects

It may be billed as Britain’s premier film awards, but when nominations for the Baftas were announced last month, the lack of British representation in the top categories was hard to ignore. Just one British actor, Robert Aramayo, appeared in the leading actor category, while there were no British nominees at all for leading actress (the UK-based Irish actor Jessie Buckley notwithstanding).

Peter Mullan was the only Briton in the supporting actor category, while representation for best supporting actress fared better, with Emily Watson, Carey Mulligan and Wunmi Mosaku nominated.

Coogler’s vampire thriller swept the Oscar nominations over Chloé Zhao’s tearjerker and Paul Thomas Anderson’s counterculture thriller. This genre-defying drama about the black experience could now rule awards season
• Full list of nominees
• Sinners becomes first film in history to earn 16 Oscar nominations

Agree with them or not, these Oscar nominations deliver a pert slap to the accepted assumptions of awards season. The industry had been expecting landslides for classy upmarket fare such as Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and also for Josh Safdie’s delirious comedy Marty Supreme. And that’s what they got.

But perhaps no one expected these titles to get quite as colossal a smackdown as they got from Ryan Coogler’s vampire drama thriller Sinners: a violent, high-energy fantasia about racism, music and the black experience, which has soared ahead with 16 nominations – the most for any film in 97 years of the Academy Awards. Whatever happens on the night itself, Ryan Coogler has made Oscar history.

From amused texts to awkward introductions, the run-up to the release of awards-tipped Shaker biopic The Testament of Ann Lee has been a strange experience

The messages started over a year ago. “The title cracked me up,” my film-loving friend Matt texted me, along with a tweet announcing a new musical called Ann Lee, starring Amanda Seyfried and directed by Mona Fastvold, about an 18th-century leader of the Shaker movement. Why would such innocuous film news delight him so much? Well, because my name is Ann Lee too.

“Yes! Fame at last!” I replied. I’ve answered in a similar vein to all the messages since then from other friends eager to break the news to me that my name was getting top billing in a prestigious Hollywood film. And I was genuinely amused and excited; for most of my life Ann Lee had seemed the beigest of names. Lee, or Li as it’s also spelled, is one of the most common surnames in the world and shared by more than 100 million people in Asia. I was sure there were many many Ann Lees out there. But when you get a film title dedicated to it? Now that’s when you start to feel your name might be special after all.