Le Journal

The College Football Playoff management committee will announce Friday that it will remain at 12 teams for 2026, according to multiple reports.There have been widespread discussions of expanding to 16 or even 24 teams for next year, but no change is expected. A formal announcement on the 2026 CFP format is expected later Friday.

Jaime King is getting divorced just seven months after her engagement announcement.

Update, 1/22/2026 at 9:15 p.m.: Variety reports that the TikTok sale has finally officially gone through, with the new company formally named the highly elegant “TikTok USDS Joint Venture.” The new version of the company will continue to operate with global TikTok—meaning you’ll still able to see, and be seen by, users in other countries—but with an intent to “retrain, test, and update the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data.” Also, “the content recommendation algorithm will be secured in Oracle’s U.S. cloud environment.” (Because nothing makes us feel safe like Larry Ellison and Abu Dhabi AI investors getting more access to our data—but so it goes.) Adam Presser, a former Warner Bros. executive who’s spent the last several years as head of operations and trust and safety for TikTok, has been named CEO of the newly formed joint venture. Original story: After years of wrangling, international diplomacy, and a seemingly endless parade of billionaire buddies of the current White House lining up to get a piece of young peoples’ eyes, thumbs, and brains, it’s sounding like the deal for American investors to (mostly) buy social media site TikTok may finally be going through. This is per a new piece in Semafor, which reports that the deal for TikTok’s U.S. operations to be sold by Chinese owner ByteDance—an issue originally raised during the first Trump administration over concerns about data security, and then signed into law in the sundown days of the Biden administration—is apparently set to close some time this week. If it does, it’ll end a saga that’s extended to brief shutdowns of the service, executive orders delaying enforcement of the ban, and the potential imperiling of like 8 million videos where a Level 101 improv student reacts to another “character” that’s just them in a hat, shot from a slightly different angle. The Semafor report includes a rundown of who will allegedly be owning U.S. TikTok once the sale goes through, a number that sees ByteDance itself maintain a legally safe 19.9 percent interest, while 15 percent stakes go to Larry Ellison’s Oracle, massive private equity firm Silver Lake, and MGX, an AI-focused firm owned by the UAE government. (Other investors pulled from the various shining minds of the billionaire class have lined up to carve up and gobble down the other 35 percent.) What’s not entirely clear yet is how much money is changing hands over the deal, although it’s likely in the ballpark of the formal economic measurement unit known as the “fuck-ton.” (J.D. Vance said late last year that the deal values TikTok at $14 billion, so some simple division and subtraction suggests the company will be well-compensated for its loss.) Previous statements from ByteDance have asserted that the new American TikTok will be responsible for its own data protection and other security, and “governed by a new seven-member majority-American board of directors.” The deal had been waiting on regulators in both the United States and China to sign off on terms; neither government has officially commented yet, but news that the deal is moving forward suggests regulatory concerns have been overcome.

The world may feel chaotic, dynamic, and full of the terrifying specter of change, but don’t worry, folks: CBS refuses to be. (Unless you look at its news coverage. Don’t look directly at CBS News.) Variety reports that the network has gone “Ain’t broke, don’t fix” on a whole bushel of its scripted (and an unsurprising smidgen of unscripted) programming today, handing down fully 10 renewal orders to its slate of existing shows. It feels worth noting that the shows in question have all been around for at least two seasons at this point; there’s something mildly amusing in the fact that one of the youngest series to get the green light in this frenzy of approval is Kathy Bates’ Matlock, which is getting a third season. Ditto Young Sheldon spin-off Georgie And Mandy’s First Marriage and NCIS: Origins, the show that dares to ask: What naval crimes were happening in the not-actually-all-that-distant past? (Modern maritime shenanigans, meanwhile, will continue to be covered by the flagship show, now set for its 24th season, or, if they’re in the Southern Hemisphere, NCIS: Sydney, clocking in at 4.) To round out the avalanche of procedurals, Tracker and Elsbeth have both been renewed for fourth seasons, too, with Fire Country (which joins its already-renewed, irritatingly named spin-off, Sheriff Country) has been picked up for number 5. And The Amazing Race and Survivor remain fundamentally unkillable, having been renewed for seasons 39 and 51, respectively. In case you’re both extremely well-versed in CBS’s current slate of shows, and also running the process of elimination right now, you’ll know that leaves exactly two current CBS primetime shows on the bubble: “What if House also had a lot of Sherlock Holmes shit in it?” series Watson, and first-season sitcom DMV. (The Neighborhood has already been canceled, while FBI, Ghosts, and Boston Blue picked up renewals previously.) There’s also a small crop of actual new shows coming in, wonder of wonders, including legal drama Cupertino from Evil‘s Robert and Michell King and Mike Colter, and Einstein, the TV show about Albert Einstein’s genius descendant working with the police to solve crimes—because the more things change, the more CBS remains determined to stay exactly what it is.

Since the summer of 2025, many predicted that Sinners was likely to be an unlikely awards spoiler. Though most awards prognosticators pinned Warner Bros.’ Oscar hopes on Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, the assumed sweeper that made good on these expectations with 13 nominations, that film’s haul was still one shy of the previous record, which was shattered by Sinners. Ryan Coogler’s musical-vampire period piece earned 16 nominations in total, the most of any film in history—more than Titanic, All About Eve, or La La Land. For what feels like the first time, the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences, critics, and audiences were in harmony. The Oscars, in part, have diversity to thank. Over the last decade, the Academy Awards have faced a litany of criticism. In 2015, the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite successfully shamed the Oscars into making some membership changes. The campaign, started by media strategist April Reign, was launched in response to the voters failing to nominate a single person of color in its acting categories. But the shame around choosing Eddie Redmayne’s turn as Stephen Hawking in Theory Of Everything over David Oyelowo’s Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma wasn’t an immediate come-to-Jesus moment for the Academy. The next year, nominees were once again So White. A few years later, the voters would remain stodgy enough to give Green Book a Best Picture win. But after a 2016 initiative to diversify the Academy’s membership, things began to change. The years following have also seen a more diverse set of movies in contention for the major awards, as the Academy has been begrudgingly outgrowing the typical definition of an “Oscar movie” for the last 25 years. The slow pushback to a long-running prejudice against genre movies (begun in earnest after The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King swept the Awards), led to Guillermo del Toro’s sad, sexy monster movies becoming Oscar staples. As if to exemplify the change in the Academy’s thinking, The Shape Of Water, a movie about a woman’s sexual awakening aided by the Creature From The Black Lagoon, was considered somewhat of a safe pick in 2018, when it received 13 nominations. A movie about sex with a fish-man couldn’t be described as Oscar bait. Neither could Parasite, Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 masterpiece, which benefited from a growing proportion of international voters to become the first non-English-language Best Picture winner. Since 2018, the Oscars have nominated at least one international film for Best Picture, including Anatomy Of A Fall and Drive My Car. Last year alone speaks to what the expanded field (and voting body) did for the Oscars, which carved out room in the category for Dune: Part Two, Wicked, The Substance, and Nickel Boys. Regardless of one’s feelings about the Academy Awards, it’s hard to call any of those nominees—whether it be a sci-fi sequel, a body-horror makeover, a Broadway fantasy, or an experimental first-person drama—anything other than the sign of an organization willing to change. This leads to June 2025, when the Academy expanded its membership to more than 10,000 people, a nearly 40% increase from 2015. While this didn’t totally offset its lopsided demographics (the Academy, like the rest of the film industry, is still overwhelmingly white and male), it did help diversify the body. In 2025, 41% of the Academy’s invitees were women, 45% were people of color, and 55% were from overseas. It’s hard not to attribute Sinners‘ record-setting nomination total as a reflection of this expanded field. A sharp rebuttal to the past two years of media cowardice and corporate reneging on diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Oscars’ more diverse membership did as intended: Put the Academy more in line with the industry it’s aiming to represent and the moviegoers who watch their art. And, after all the handwringing about Ryan Coogler’s deal, Sinners was a genuine hit. It was the eighth-highest-grossing movie of 2025, and the only…