As the great Ferris Bueller once said: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” And that’s precisely how we feel roughly halfway through 2025, this most engrossing of years, particularly as it pertains to pop culture. Almost six full months into the calendar, we’ve already been treated to a deluge of must-watch television, standout movie performances, riveting real-time internet discourses, and everything in between. So, as any self-respecting group of writers and editors on the internet would do, we decided to dole out some awards to the best the year has had to offer.
These aren’t the type of awards you’ll find at the Grammys or Oscars—or even in our own “Best of the Year So Far” lists coming in July. These are for the highly specific, resonant, and at times outlandish people, projects, and moments that have defined 2025 to date. These people and things deserve acknowledgment, too, and we’re here to provide that recognition. So, without further ado, we present: The Ringer’s 2025 Midyear Pop Culture Awards.
Best Double Feature: Sinners and the Cowboy Carter Tour
Watching the opening night of the Cowboy Carter Tour was like witnessing God (i.e., Beyoncé) crack America open and remake it in her own image—and not only in her image, but also in the image of the Black musicians who came before her: Jimi Hendrix, Linda Martell, Nina Simone, Chuck Berry, Gil Scott-Heron, and on and on. It’s a glamorous, gun-slinging, genre-defying statement about music history and the Black artists who sang it into life, and Sinners—which came out 10 days before the opening night of the tour—is a bloody, horny, bluesy story with almost suspiciously similar goals. In one of the video interludes that plays during the Cowboy Carter show, Beyoncé gets into a shoot-out with an Old West gunman, and his silver bullets bounce right off her. Like the vampires that stalk and do jigs around Sinners, she’s a supernatural, basically unbeatable force, and that scene could fit right in with the movie’s stories about the undead and staking a claim on America and its music. I caught the Cowboy Carter Tour and Sinners back-to-back (I know, I was way late to see Sinners—the Michael B. Jordan fan edits had already reached the third or fourth stage of their evolution by the time I watched it), and now that Sinners is on VOD and Beyoncé’s almost back stateside, you have no excuse not to do the same thing. —Helena Hunt
Most Alarming Collision of Two High-Agency Males: Jeff Bezos Buys James Bond
It’s not as if the James Bond franchise were independent, exactly. It’s a series that’s grossed almost $8 billion worldwide, not some wide-eyed college art project. But until this year, in the world of massive corporate IP, 007 was relatively independent. It was controlled, as it had been for decades, by the Broccoli family (yes, that’s their real name), who carefully curated their star superspy’s appearances and protected him from overexposure. It’s due to their oversight that the Bond films, for all their uneven quality, have always felt a little quirkier, a little less made-by-committee, and a little more human than most of what comes out of the Giant Hollywood Blockbuster Play-Doh Factory.
This year, though, the Broccolis finally sold out—to Amazon, of all places— which means Jeff Bezos now controls the world’s leading icon of aspirational masculinity. Are we in for a Star Wars- or Marvel-like glut of Bond TV shows, Bond cartoons, and straight-to-streaming Bond movies? Is this a license to kill (the franchise)? Time will tell, but in one sense, the pairing does make sense. After all, Bond’s high-gloss adventures in espionage have always emphasized two of Amazon’s core brand values: product placement and disrespecting data privacy. —Brian Phillips
Most Shockingly Durable Drama: Aimee Lou Wood vs. Saturday Night Live
The third season of The White Lotus ended on April 6, and we’re still talking about it. Not because we can’t get over Sam Rockwell’s Episode 6 monologue, or the fact that Mike White might’ve implied that the soul of Rick Hatchett was reborn in young Lochlan. No—somehow, the reason The White Lotus is still in the ether is because Saturday Night Live made a joke about Aimee Lou Wood’s teeth. This “drama”—in quotes because it’s not very dramatic at all—will not die, and legacy media seems determined to make sure that it defines the careers of both Wood and SNL’s Sarah Sherman.
It all started during the Jon Hamm–hosted episode on April 12, when a sketch called “The White POTUS” aired. It’s one of those SNL sketches you’ve seen a thousand times that’s not great but also not bad; a sort of flailing attempt by the show to latch onto something else popping off in the zeitgeist. But among SNL’s usual political impressions was Sherman as Wood’s White Lotus character, with the bit being, basically, “her teeth are different.” Wood is certainly not the first victim of a surface-level drive-by from SNL—there are a handful of them in every episode—but this one found air to breathe for a few reasons: (1) Wood had already spent the White Lotus run talking about her unique Chiclets; (2) the joke was, even for SNL, mean and oddly underbaked; and (3) Wood went and posted a response to it on Instagram Stories. From there, the story hit all of the expected beats when it comes to something like this: Wood’s displeasure was covered intensely, places like Page Six published paparazzi photos insinuating that Wood’s life had been ruined by Saturday Night Live (which Wood later denied via IG Stories), and then, a few days later, an apology, which came in the form of flowers from Sherman (posted by Wood on IG Stories).
That should’ve been the end of it! Both parties said their piece, a truce was reached, done deal. But not this time, pal. A few days after Sherman’s apology, Bowen Yang was asked about it by Extra. A full month after the sketch aired, Sherman broke her silence about it in a profile for Vanity Fair (which was then aggregated into oblivion). As recently as early June, this pretty bad, ultimately forgettable SNL sketch was still at the center of features on Wood, kicking off the discourse cycle anew.
Is it a slow news year? Are we this obsessed with talking about a woman’s physical features and her insecurities about them? Are we way too addicted to drama, even really obviously bad and stupid drama? Have we forgotten what Saturday Night Live is? Did Aimee Lou Wood just post too much? Or is it that The White Lotus turned her into America’s best friend and thus everyone is particularly protective of her? Whatever the reason, this whole thing was a three-day story that has somehow become a three-month story. No magazine should ever invoke this sketch to Wood or Sherman or Yang or Walton Goggins again. And if they do, Wood should call them out on Instagram Stories. —Andrew Gruttadaro
Best Movie of the Year That Was Actually a TV Episode: The Righteous Gemstones Season 4 Premiere
The premise of my favorite TV episode of the year (so far) sounds like a damn good movie. It’s set during the Civil War and stars Bradley Cooper as a con man who kills a minister, assumes his identity, then joins the Confederate Army as a chaplain. The season premiere of The Righteous Gemstones—the preacher family’s origin story—was gory, scary, funny, and totally surprising. Danny McBride cowrote and directed the mini-epic, which features none of the main cast.
The main character, McBride said, needed “to be somebody that the audience will be excited to see in this world. And I was like, ‘Somebody like Bradley Cooper.’ You’re just throwing it out. And then we sent it to him, and he responded to it right away. So we really, really lucked out.” “Prelude” was the show at its best and yet more proof that studios should be giving McBride big budgets to make cool shit. —Alan Siegel
Most Diabolical Smile: Kendrick Lamar at the Super Bowl Halftime Show
Let’s be clear: There was never a doubt he’d perform it. Despite any pending legal action—and despite the fact that corporate sponsors are presumably leery of getting anywhere near a song that accuses one’s rival of pedophilia—Kendrick Lamar was always going to build his Super Bowl halftime set around “Not Like Us.” The song was too big, with record-breaking streaming success and a cultural impact that can’t be quantified by simple counting stats. It’s arguably the greatest diss track ever made, and it’s perhaps the defining moment of both Kendrick’s and Drake’s careers. From the moment the performance was announced, you could reasonably presume that it would crescendo with a crowd of 65,000 people shouting A-minooooooooor.
But what happened in the Caesars Superdome this past February was far more diabolical than anything you could’ve imagined. My colleague Cole Cuchna has a far more in-depth breakdown of what Kendrick was trying to communicate with his halftime set. But with all due respect to Dissect, you don’t need a master’s degree in Kung Fu Kenny Studies to properly interpret what that smile meant. It came as Kendrick stared right at the camera, looking out at the 100-plus million watching at home. But he was really speaking to an audience of one. “Hey, Drake,” Kendrick said, flashing a sly grin, knowing that in the history of entertainment feuds, no other person had ever broken their foe down quite like this. Some victors dance on the graves of their vanquished opponents. This one invited his famous friend to Crip walk on it. And he sure looked happy doing so. —Justin Sayles
Most Ethically Complicated Romances: Severance
Materialists, Celine Song’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated Past Lives, is another thought-provoking meditation on modern love that features another female protagonist torn between two men in her life. But this award isn’t going to the newly released romantic comedy (which isn’t really a romantic comedy at all). Instead, it’s going to a TV show about work-life balance, a mysterious (and important) biotech company, and baby goats: Severance.
In Season 2, love is in the air at Lumon Industries—and there isn’t an HR department in sight to stop any of the severed employees from doing whatever (or whoever) they please. What makes the workplace romances so unique and compelling on Severance is just how complicated they are, from both an ethical and a logistical standpoint. Due to the extraordinary nature of the severance procedure, a severed employee can have a love life inside the office and yet have no knowledge of it in the outside world. That dissonance creates all sorts of fascinating ethical dilemmas for the macrodata refinement team of Mark, Helly, Dylan, and Irving, along with their outies and their respective partners.
Would it be wrong for Gretchen to cheat on her husband, Dylan, with … another version of him? Whose relationship is more important: Mark and Gemma’s, or Mark S. and Helly’s—even if the latter couple is a pair of innies? Severance’s central love triangle (or love hexagon?) between Mark, Helly, and Gemma was the subject of the season finale’s excruciating cliff-hanger. And I’m going to spend the even more excruciating yearslong wait until the release of Season 3 wondering which couple is more worth rooting for. —Daniel Chin
Most Overdue 4K Restorations: The Films of Michael Mann
Tired of relying on streaming services, over the past year, I’ve been converted to the joys of physical media ownership. More specifically, I’m shelling out for 4K releases—my early collection includes titles like Lawrence of Arabia, Apocalypse Now, The New World, and, much to the confusion of everyone in my life, Aquaman. The most important 4Ks, however, are the ones from my favorite filmmaker, Michael Mann. Just three 4Ks were on the market for much of 2024—Heat, Collateral, and Blackhat—and as a true Mann’s man, I made quick work of acquiring them. But the fact that one of the most influential figures in American cinema has so few movies available in the highest-quality format is downright sacrilegious.
Thankfully, recent months are slowly but surely righting these wrongs. In November, there was a 4K restoration of The Keep, the supernatural horror film that Mann disowned but can still be appreciated for its eerie vibes. Then, in March, Criterion issued a 4K of Mann’s theatrical debut, Thief, which is excellent in its own right and also acts as a skeleton key for the rest of his filmography. Finally, this summer, we’ll be getting a Miami Vice 4K, something worth buying for the “Numb/Encore” nightclub opening alone. In less than a year, Mann’s 4Ks will have doubled, and I’ll be in lockstep with every release. For me, the collection is the juice. —Miles Surrey
Hypothetical of the Year: 100 Men vs. One Gorilla
The moment I knew the internet was, fleetingly, good again predated the proliferation of the gorilla 3D fight simulation, or Shaq saying a silverback once looked at him through the plexiglass at Zoo Miami like, “Hey, man, what the fuck you doing out there, and I’m in here?” It wasn’t necessarily the memes, though by no means did the memes hurt. My people’s use of this glorious clip to describe what’d happen to the first wave of Homo sapiens to go up against their distant, 400-pound, rainforest-dwelling cousin belongs on the Mount Rushmore of sweet online nothings, but not necessarily in the Louvre. What I’m saying is that we were having an exceptional time, using “Vince Wilforks” as a system of measurement, and then the rapper Freddie Gibbs hit us with this: “Once the gorilla start throwing dookie n----z is tapped out.” A better combination of words has yet to be typed, thought, or spoken aloud this year. —Lex Pryor
Bravery Award for Writing Fan Fiction About Yourself: The Weeknd, Hurry Up Tomorrow
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you met your favorite pop star? Would they notice you in the middle of a screaming crowd? Would you be able to understand them better than any of the fake hangers-on in their life? Would they whisk you away into a night of spontaneous adventure? Connect with you on things they’ve never told anyone before?
OK, maybe that just sounds like a vague description of a mid-2010s Tumblr account, but I can confirm that Abel Tesfaye (a.k.a. the Weeknd) has wondered this—but with himself in the pop star role. In Hurry Up Tomorrow, which Tesfaye cowrote and which coincides with his album of the same name, Jenna Ortega plays a Weeknd fan who sneaks backstage at one of his concerts, and the following unfolds: Tesfaye invites her to run away with him, Ortega’s character is moved to tears by a Weeknd song he plays for her on his phone, and, somehow, loneliness and distant parents are discussed. If only Ortega had been reading a book at the concert, I could’ve sworn this was pulled straight from Wattpad. And this is all before a toxic and violent turn that could’ve easily been a beat in the Harry Styles–inspired After series.
Maybe this is innovation—I can’t say I’ve ever thought about a pop star searching their own tag on Archive of Our Own, coming up empty, and filling the hole in the market themselves. (Although, based on Hurry Up Tomorrow’s box office performance, maybe there was a hole in the market for a reason.) And for that, I give Tesfaye a round of applause—writing a scene where Jenna Ortega goes through your Spotify page and explains why all of your songs are deep and important couldn’t have been easy. (OK, on second thought, maybe I deserve the Bravery Award for watching Hurry Up Tomorrow.) —Julianna Ress
Best Statues of Critics: Charli XCX’s Letterboxd Account and Coachella Set
Considering Charli XCX’s pre-Brat career was a bigger thing on Pitchfork than it was on the Billboard charts, you can forgive me for rolling my eyes at the T-shirt. “They don’t build statues of critics,” it read, with the person wearing it ignoring not only a key bloc of her support base but also the fact that, actually, sometimes they do.
You’ll also grant me a moment to gloat about the discovery, just before New Year’s, that Charli has an account on Letterboxd, the app that’s birthed more amateur critics than every Film 101 college course in America combined. Admittedly, however, she’s a half-decent follow—she doesn’t often use the star system and only occasionally leaves an actual text review as opposed to simply hearting a film, but you have to admire the taste, like this stretch from earlier this month, when she logged these films in succession.
The repertory film revival is alive and well in major cities in America, and apparently wherever Charli is posting from.
She doubled down on her film-bro era a few months back when she mercifully declared an end to Brat Summer and the arrival of a few dozen other fill-in-the-blank solstices during her Coachella set. Of course, some of those summers were of the music variety—Ethel Cain, Haim, and Turnstile all got shout-outs on the main-stage big screen. But fittingly, she also mentioned a handful of filmmakers: Joachim Trier, Celine Song, Ari Aster, etc. So, I must ask: How are you spending your Cronenberg Summer? Hopefully by reading—and then building some small monument for—another great Canadian: esteemed film critic and Ringer contributor Adam Nayman. —Sayles
Best Supporting Character: Jimp in Friendship
After 88 minutes of Friendship, you’ve been through a lot. Tim Robinson’s Craig has grown increasingly Tim Robinson–esque by the second: He’s blown his friendship with the local weather guy, Austin, by getting too hyper at a group hang; he’s lost his wife in the sewer system; he’s licked a psychotropic toad that took him on a trip to Subway. And now he’s brandishing a gun at Austin’s latest party when he realizes that not only was he not invited, but the crew has obtained a new guy.
“What’s your name?” Craig barks, pointing the weapon.
“Jimp. I got two twin girls,” Jimp responds.
“Jim?” Craig asks.
“No, Jimp. It’s like ‘jump’ ... with an i.”
Cutting this kind of bizarro tension is a near-impossible task, but Andrew DeYoung, Friendship’s writer and director, figured out how to do it, saving his most out-of-left-field joke in a movie full of out-of-left-field jokes for this final showdown. It’s so simple, yet so complex. So random, so unexpected, so delightfully inexplicable. Jimp. You turn the name over and over in your head every day since seeing the movie. Jimp, Jimp, Jimp … Like “jump” with an i. —Gruttadaro
Most Limited-Edition Fruit Spread—Not Jam!—Venture With a Netflix Tie-in and a Podcast: As Ever by Meghan Markle
I’ll remember April of 2025 as the month that, after a year of promotion, a brand relaunch, and several hours of Netflix content, Meghan Markle sold out of her jam—WAIT, no, her fruit spread. She did it in less than an hour! While that quick pace might be mostly due the limited amount of jam—sorry, ugh, fruit spread!—that was made available in the first place in order to create a sense of scarcity, people were also pretty tuned in to the Duchess of Sussex this spring thanks to her Netflix lifestyle series, With Love, Meghan. Markle went to significant lengths to showcase her love of adult crafts alongside people I believe she has met at least once before, and, honestly, it did kind of make me want to try her wares! Unfortunately, despite continuing to lean into her entrepreneurial identity with the launch of her podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder, Markle has since announced that As Ever won’t be releasing new products until 2026 (though it may be restocking existing products) and that maybe she’s pivoting to fashion and hospitality. Which is fine, it’s just a lot of effort to put into the very limited sales of your jam. I MEAN FRUIT SPREAD!!!! —Nora Princiotti
The First-Team All-MSG Starting Five
In the ’70s, it was Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford, and Dustin Hoffman who were #indabuilding. In the ’90s, we had Spike Lee, Jerry Seinfeld, and JFK Jr. And now, with the Knicks finally making the playoffs on the regular after decades of irrelevance, the famous fans at the self-proclaimed World’s Most Famous Arena are so, so back, experiencing both the thrill of victory and the agony of Tyrese.
Here—with apologies to the banished—are this year’s starting five of celebrity Knicks fans, so chosen for their commitment, their aura, and the likelihood that Walt “Clyde” Frazier has shaken their hand.
PF Jon Stewart: On the strength of that above photo alone! (Also notable: Tracy Morgan, on account of that one time he had a scorching case of courtside food poisoning. There but for the grace of God, etc.)
SG John Starks: The best of all the Knicks alumni in the stands throughout the playoffs—and they were legion. All the unhinged energy from his playing days, half-trapped behind those crisp button-downs. (Also notable: dear sweet Melo.)
PG Susie Essman: The fan I’d most love to sit next to. (Also notable: Larry David can dish it out, sure. But can he take it?!)
SF Timothée Chalamet: Instant icon. Urban clown (complimentary). Certified ball knower so pure that he has that Landry Fields scavenger hunt badge. PS: Mike Francesa raved about him to Josh Safdie and has seen Dylan double-digit times. (Also notable: Kylie Jenner isn’t All-MSG material, but she is a certified road warrior.)
C Ben Stiller: Truly no one looms larger or puts up more minutes in the paint on Knicks social media. (Also notable: my guy Jerry Ferrara!)
Coach Spike Lee: The OG. Accept no substitutes. Reportedly pays for his own tickets, thankyouverymuch. —Katie Baker
