The daily gossip: Jennifer Garner is crying over The Office, Kobe Bryant mentored Naomi Osaka, and more

1. Jennifer Garner finishes The Office in tears

Have you heard of The Office? Jennifer Garner thinks you should watch it. After watching an episode a day with her family throughout the coronavirus pandemic, she finally reached the series finale on Monday and it gave her some "really big feelings." Clad in a Dunder Mifflin T-shirt, the actress recorded her reaction (accidentally in slow motion). In a voice-over reacting to her reaction, Garner perfectly captured everyone's current mood: "Look who needed a big cry, and maybe a shower … It's just nice to know you can still just feel so much passion about something, right?" She concluded the video with a tearful, "Bears, beets, Battlestar Galactica."

People

2. How Kobe Bryant helped Naomi Osaka find her confidence

When Naomi Osaka wins a tennis match, she doesn't celebrate. She thinks, "this is what I was supposed to do." Her manager, Stuart Duguid, always believed Osaka could "transcend tennis," so he introduced her to another transcendent athlete in June 2019: Kobe Bryant, reports WSJ Magazine. The athletes met in what Osaka said was "the most productive meeting I've had in my life." From then until his death, Bryant was a mentor to Osaka, and texted her “positive things” to help her learn from tough losses, even when she didn't think he was paying attention. "It was definitely helpful," she said. Osaka told Bryant she wanted to be just like him, but he told her, "No, be better."

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The Wall Street Journal

3. Nikki Bella and Artem Chigvintsev are only married in Good Morning America's imagination

Love in the time of coronavirus has meant lots and lots of secret weddings (presumably so gossip newsletters like yours truly won't call them all out for flouting local social distancing restrictions). But how about a secret wedding that wasn't? Total Bellas' Nikki Bella and her fiancé, Dancing with the Stars' Artem Chigvintsev, did not get married on the down low, TMZ confirms. The brief confusion among fans stemmed from Good Morning America referring to Nikki as Artem's "wife" during an announcement that the professional dancer would be returning to Dancing with the Stars. In truth, the couple is reportedly patiently waiting to have a non-socially-distanced wedding — responsibly! — when the COVID-19 hullabaloo has finally passed.

TMZ

4. Hozier accidentally posted on main and is embarrassed about it

"You live by the Squidward filter, you die by the Squidward filter." - Hozier, 2020. After accidentally posting a video to his Instagram story using the handsome Squidward filter, Hozier is apologizing to fans. In the since-deleted video, a handsome-Squidward Hozier said "Yeah girl," with a laugh. The singer said he wasn't high, he just pressed the wrong button — the video was intended "just for the boys." To truly convey his embarrassment, he captioned his apology video with "I am deceased," in three languages. "Thanks for understanding, thanks for your discretion, and thanks for not posting it on Twitter," he said. (Alas, fans did post it on Twitter.)

Twitter

5. The 2020 Emmys will just be 140 live streams, apparently

The Emmys might be virtual this year, but its producers have no intention of scaling things back. With less than a month before the Primetime Emmy Awards on Sept. 20, Done+Dusted president Ian Stewart, whose company helps produce the ceremony, explained to Variety that despite the pandemic, "we want to bring every nominee that we can logistically, live into the show." In practice, that means the Emmys will be dealing with "120-140 [live feeds] coming in," Stewart said. He added, "This will all depend on the comfort level of the people at the other end, but we've got to go and find them." Ah, so the 2020 Emmys will be both a logistical nightmare and the world's most aggressive game of celebrity hide-and-seek!

Variety Lainey Gossip