BusinessAnalysis

And the Bafta for best film-inspired resurgence goes to ... Sophie Ellis-Bextor

Planet Business: Lyft gets its numbers wrong, Joe Biden joins China’s TikTok and what we know about the Paris Olympics

A staff member uses 'heads on sticks' to check camera blocking at the Royal Festival Hall in London, where the Baftas will be held on Sunday. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA Wire

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Laura Slattery
Sat Feb 17 2024 - 06:15

Image of the week: Bafta dancefloor

The pre-Oscars awards circuit collectively shimmies its way to the Royal Festival Hall in London this weekend, and nominees including Cillian Murphy, Emma Stone and Ayo Edebiri have been in situ all week – or rather their publicity shots have been. This array of heads on sticks is not the seating plan as such, but the method by which camera blocking was checked ahead of the broadcast.

The Baftas, of course, provides the opportunity to the British film industry – hit by a 32 per cent decline in production spending last year thanks to the knock-on effects of Hollywood strikes – to showcase its biggest triumph of 2023: Sophie Ellis-Bextor.

Emerald Fennell’s prominent use of 22-year-old hit Murder on the Dancefloor in her much-streamed film Saltburn has given fresh exposure to the Ellis-Bextor classic, prompting the Wrong Side of the Sun singer to make her long overdue US television debut (on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon) this week before flying back for a performance at the Bafta film ceremony.

Saltburn star Barry Keoghan – representing Ireland in the acting categories alongside Murphy and Paul Mescal (though, sadly, not Andrew Scott) – will presumably be staying in his seat for the newly anointed TikTok favourite this time. In the unlikely event that any of the attendees are tempted to channel his character’s enjoyment of the song, we won’t see it, as the show is broadcast on BBC One with a one-hour time delay.

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In numbers: One little zero

67%

Surge in the share price of taxi-hailing and mobility company Lyft in after-hours trading on Tuesday following the release of its quarterly earnings update.

500

Number of basis points that Lyft said its earnings margin would expand by this year. Alas, that wasn’t quite right.

50

Number of basis points it meant to say – an increase of 0.5 per cent, not 5 per cent. “My bad,” said Lyft chief executive David Risher.

Getting to know: @bidenhq

The handle @bidenhq, dedicated to the election/re-election campaign of the Biden-Harris ticket for The White House, was once the preserve of Twitter/X, but that’s not going to cut it any more. Joe Biden (81), fresh from a sustained wave of commentary about memory lapses and physical frailty, has now joined TikTok, getting down with the kids with a launch video captioned “lol hey guys”. The US president’s arrival on the social media platform, owned by China’s ByteDance, has raised some eyebrows, and not in the emoji sense. Who was it who signed legislation in 2022 blocking most US federal government devices from using TikTok? Just some guy called Joe Biden.

The list: Olympic update

The Olympic Games is now just a little over five months away with individual athletes and teams qualifying or failing to qualify on a near-daily basis. Here are five of the things we have learned about the plans for Paris this month.

1. Medal design: Luxury Paris jewellery house Chaumet have designed the medals for the event and, judging from the reveal, they’ve done a podium-worthy job, even sticking in some “fragments” of the Eiffel Tower.

2. Book U-turn: French president Emmanuel Macron has scrapped plans to relocate the bouquinistes – Parisian booksellers based on the banks of the Seine – for the opening ceremony because they are part of the “living heritage” of the city.

3. Heatwave fear: More than 100 people in Milan protested last Saturday about the environmental impact of the 2026 winter Olympics. In Paris, meanwhile, organisers have identified the possibility of extreme heat this summer as one of the key staging risks.

4. Couch Olympics: RTÉ indicated at this week’s Oireachtas media committee that there has been strong sponsor interest in its broadcast of the games, giving its commercial revenues a much-needed boost.

5. Rapper’s delight: Snoop Dogg will be returning to US broadcaster NBC’s coverage, with the hip-hop star saying his ambition for Paris involved “shaking it up in many different ways, bringing my flavour”. Just a standard city break, then.

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