The daily gossip: J.Lo and A-Rod break up, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé could make history at the Grammys, and more

1. Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez break up, confirming love is dead

A third time is not, in fact, the charm. Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez have reportedly broken up, after postponing their wedding twice last year due to the pandemic. The couple was engaged for two years, and together for four. The news comes as quite a shock to fans; J-Rod were described as "perfect together." According to Page Six, it's "unclear when the trouble in paradise for the engaged couple began," although they endured the usual tabloid gossip scandals over the years, including Jose Canseco accusing his former fellow New York Yankee of cheating with Canseco's ex-wife the day after A-Rod and J.Lo announced their engagement. The break-up will leave lots to sort out, since J.Lo and A-Rod were in business together and shared several expensive properties. On the upside, though, at least they don't have to divvy up a whole baseball team?

Page Six

2. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé could make history at the 2021 Grammys

Swifties and the Beyhive might both come away satisfied from this year's Grammys. The 2021 awards ceremony will take place on Sunday after being delayed almost two months due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and many pundits are predicting Taylor Swift will score the Album of the Year prize for her hit quarantine album Folklore. If Swift wins, she'll make history as the first female artist to win that award three times after previously earning it for Fearless and 1989. Beyoncé is expected to have a big night, too. She led the Grammy nominations this year with nine, and Gold Derby predicts she'll become the "most awarded woman of all time" with a total of 29 Grammys after possibly taking five more on Sunday, including Best R&B Performance for "Black Parade" and Best Rap Performance for "Savage."

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3. Eddie Murphy reveals that working on 'sh---y' movies made him so depressed that he stopped acting for 8 years

Eddie Murphy returns this month with the Coming to America sequel, but you're not wrong for thinking you haven't seen him around much lately. Drew Barrymore was also wondering what the story was when she interviewed the legendary actor on her show on Friday. "I had it all the way together for years and years and years," Murphy explained, "and then what happened with movies is they started offering you so much money to do stuff that I wound up doing." Murphy added that he did a "bunch of movies like that," but "it's forever" and "that sh---y movie is still playing on the movie channel," so he stopped having fun with his work. "I had to take a time," he said, but eight years later, "I got it all back together that way."

Just Jared

4. The Weeknd is officially boycotting the Grammys

The Weeknd might have been rejected by the Grammys this year, but let the record show he broke up with them first! On Thursday, the Canadian pop star behind the history-making hit "Blinding Lights" said that he will "no longer allow my label to submit my music to the Grammys," accusing the institution's "secret committees" of shutting him out of a nomination this year. Though the Grammys are voted on by music professionals, an anonymous ("secret") committee is able to alter the final nominations as they see fit. The committee exists to supposedly help adjust for awareness bias (when artists with greater name recognition are favored over lesser-known emerging artists), although "the lack of transparency makes artists suspicious about the process," Vulture reports.

Vulture The New York Times

5. Actress Emily Mortimer seems to have plagiarized part of her New York Times essay about Lolita

More than 50 years after it was first published, Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita is still starting scandals. Earlier this month, The Newsroom actress Emily Mortimer wrote an essay for The New York Times about how Lolita has avoided getting canceled, despite it being the story of a pedophile. But as The New Republic's Jacob Silverman noticed Friday, the Times added an editor's note shortly after the essay was published, disclosing that Mortimer "included several sentences adapted, without attribution, from an article by Caitlin Flanagan" that was published in the September 2018 issue of The Atlantic. Mortimer's original essay can be read here, though the piece up on The New York Times now has been revised to properly attribute "those passages."

The New Republic