Gina Rinehart portrait saga gains international attention — from the BBC to Stephen Colbert (2024)

All eyes were on Cannes last week as the film industry's brightest and richest descended on the French city's film festival to give us a little peek at what could be dominating next year's award season.

But more on that later. Here's what else you missed in entertainment over the weekend.

• Gina Rinehart's Streisand effect in full swing on Colbert
• Taylor Swift lets her pick me show over Billie Eilish's album launch
• Sydney Comedy Festival announces award winners
• Cannes weekend one brings body horror and Barry Keoghan
• Brace for it: Andrew Scott has narrated an erotic audiobook
• Tinashe gets her freak on for Nasty

Portrait of a Lady (that the subject may want to set) on Fire

Mining heiress and billionaire Gina Rinehart's reported requests to have The National Gallery of Australia remove Vincent Namatjira's unflattering portrait of her have officially gone global.

There was coverage of the controversy on the BBCandCNN, and comedian Dan Ilic is trying to raise $30,000 for the portrait to be displayed in Times Square.

It even merited a mention on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Colbert — whose show reaches an average of 2.57 million US viewers — covered the fracas on Saturday night's show. He joked: "I'm no art expert but in this portrait I believe the artist really captured her expression at the moment she saw this portrait."

Namatjira was the first Aboriginal Australian to win the Archibald Prize. The painting was first shown in 2021 and is one of 21 of Namatjira's portraits of people who have shaped Australia on display at the NGA.

It's since emerged that there's a second Namatjira portrait at the NGA that Rinehart's supporters are lobbying to remove.

However you feel about an Archibald winner's right to artistic expression versus Australia's richest woman's right to flattering representation, it's safe to say that attempts to remove Rinehart's portrait have ensured it's reached a wider audience than the usual NGA foot traffic.

— Hannah Reich

Taylor came for Billie's album launch and fans are screaming snake

After three long years, Billie Eilish fans were blessed on Friday with her new album, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT. And in the short time since its release the pop star has garnered praise for her mature evolution.

All Billie Eilish fans wanted to do on Friday was sit back, relax and enjoy their evening with an album they'd been waiting years to hear, when all of a sudden they heard an aggravating, grating voice. It was pop superstar/billionaire real estate mogul Taylor Swift.

Mere hours before Eilish dropped her album, Swift announced she was releasing three digital download album variants of her recent LP, The Tortured Poets Department.

Swift's most recent digital variants are a must-buy for any fan … because they contain never-before-heard voice memos.

For those playing at home, this will bring the amount of variants Swift has released since the album came out to 22: six vinyl pressings, four cassettes, nine CDs, two original digital downloads and the three new digital variants.

Back in March, when Eilish was still promoting her album, she had a crack at artists who released multiple vinyl album variants, pointing out the negative effect on the environment.

"It's some of the biggest artists in the world making f***king 40 different vinyl packages that have a different unique thing just to get you to keep buying more," she told Billboard.

Some interpreted Swift's surprise variant drop as a shady retort.

This is not the first time Swift's antics around other artists' releases have been questioned.

In 2014 the singer took all her music off Spotify to protest artists' royalty payouts, but after three years of the protest not changing all that much, she put all her music back on the platform. The day she decided to return? Katy Perry's Witness album drop day.

To quote Swift herself: "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help other women."

— Velvet Winter

Sydney Comedy Festival award winners announced

The winners of this year's Sydney Comedy Festival awards have been announced today, with Sydney-based comic and composer Lou Wall taking out Best of the Fest for their show The Bisexual's Lament.

In their show, Wall — who is also a presenter on ABC TV's WTFAQ — catalogued the worst year of their life, 2023, through 69 things that made them laugh and helped them get through it. Through a Powerpoint presentation and song, Wall described everything from their friend accidentally eating a Schmacko to a woman she met on Facebook Marketplace stealing their neighbour's bed.

The show was also nominated for best show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

If you missed The Bisexual's Lament, you can catch an encore performance at the Comedy Store on June 7.

Other winners at the awards, each taking home $1,500, were Kiwi comedian and self-proclaimed former "weird kid" David Correos (Taskmaster NZ), who won Best Newcomer with his show I Can't Stop Vibrating; and Sydney-based comedian and actor Elouise Eftos (Colin from Accounts) who won Director's Choice with her debut show Australia's First Attractive Comedian, proving that women comedians don't have to be self-deprecating to be funny.

"They are all part of a new wave of comedians that are making ground in the Australian scene," said Sydney Comedy Festival director Jorge Menidis. "Their approaches to their respective works were bold and engaged with audiences in a euphoric manner."

— Hannah Story

Cannibals, body horror and rat eating — Cannes is underway!

The dresses are flashy, the stars are out and the Cannes Film Festival is in full swing! The prestigious French festival opened with a bang last week, premiering Francis Ford Coppola's 40-year passion project Megalopolis.

Some people loved it, some people hated it, some people simply said WTF?

But multiple films debuted over the weekend that are worth keeping an eye on in the run-up to awards season.

Hot out of the gate is The Substance, a body horror meditation on Hollywood's obsession with youth. Demi Moore stars as an aging star whose plans to get back to the top involve a mysterious medical goo. Helmed by French director Coralie Fargeat, it got a huge 13-minute standing ovation at its midnight premiere. Keep your excitement under wraps though, there's been no release confirmation … yet.

Nicolas Cage's The Surfer already blessed us with these photos from when he was filming in Busselton, WA, last year. But, by all accounts, the film is actually quite good as well! Starring Cage as a man who returns to his beach home town to surf (ding) only to be faced with some surly locals, it also features local faves such as Julian McMahon and Miranda Tapsell. We don't know when the film will be hitting our shores but we do know it'll be on Stan. Oh also, Cage eats a rat in it — do with that information what you want.

Lots of eyes have been on Bird, the British film that bathwater sommelier Barry Keoghan dumped his part in Gladiator 2 for. Keoghan stars as Bug, the heavily tattooed father of a 12-year-old girl who's pushing up against puberty and aching to have the coming-of-age experience in her working-class life. The film, which received an 11-minute standing ovation at Cannes, marks director Andrea Arnold's return to the festival following her 2021 documentary Cow, which made us cry Pixar tears over a bovine named Luma. Streaming service Mubi scooped it up out of Cannes for UK release, but we're still without global details.

And Yorgos Lanthamos fans can rejoice, because their disturbed fave is back in full form with his new thriller anthology Kinds Of Kindness. Returning surprisingly soon after his Oscar-winning effort Poor Things, reports say that KoK sees the Greek auteur lean into the yucky things that made his 2009 film Dogtooth such a gripping watch. You can expect cannibalism, cults and Emma Stone when this one hits cinemas on July 11.

The Cannes Film Festival continues until May 25.

— Velvet Winter

Huge news for everyone who dreams of having Andrew Scott whisper sweet nothings in their ear

Not only has Irish actor and heart-throb Andrew Scott dipped his toe into the world of audiobook narration for the first time, he's taken on a character in an erotic series.

The Fleabag/All of Us Strangers/Ripley star voices Robb the Protector in The Queen's Guard, a new original series on the Quinn app, which is exclusively dedicated to erotic audio stories.

The premise is beautiful, undiluted, dark, romantasy trash: In a small but powerful kingdom, Robb is the personal guard to a cruel despotic queen. He can't let Mira, the leader of a growing resistance, get anywhere near her.

"Look at you. Look at how beautifully your body bears the marks of everything you've been through," Scott teased in a snippet from the project.

"I could worship every one of them."

Episodes are dropping weekly, with the first already out. Run, don't walk, etc, etc.

— Yasmin Jeffery

Tinashe's Nasty has everyone asking: Is somebody gonna match my freak?

You might have noticed a lot of people on your social media posting various memes captioned: Is somebody gonna match my freak?

It all links back to the track Nasty, by independent R&Bsinger Tinashe. While she has been steadily releasing music beloved by critics for the past decade, her latest single is having a moment thanks to TikTok.

The song's short length, repetition and provocative lyrics ("I been a nasty girl, nasty") are perfect for the platform's algorithm, but its virality feels much more organic.

The song — the lead single from upcoming album BB/Ang3l Pt. 2 - Quantum Baby — didn't quite pick up upon release last month, until a Twitter user posted a video of TikTok dancer @nates.vibe going off and getting decidedly nasty. Somehow the original video wasn't set to the track, yet he hits every beat and embodies the song's ethos. Cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see.

As more people appreciated the man's dexterity and facial expressions, Tinashe posted her own video dancing in-sync with Nates. Thus, it became the track's unofficial music video.

Nasty's lyric "is somebody gonna match my freak?" has also inspired its own meme on X, with users sharing iconic fictional and famous couples who fit the bill.

These include Rita Ora and Taika Waititi; the teacher and goth band member from School of Rock, and performance artists Marina Abramovic and Ulay. You can find everyone's freak-matched pairings here.

On the charts, Nasty debuted at #6 on Billboard's R&B Digital Song Sales Chart and is currently sitting in the top 100 of Spotify's Viral Songs globally and in 10 countries, including Australia.

— Jared Richards