Charli XCX leads this year’s Brit Awards with five nominations, including a nod for album of the year with Brat.
She is also nominated for artist of the year, best pop and dance act and song of the year with Guess, featuring Billie Eilish, which went to number one in August.
Her sixth studio album was released in June and grew into a cultural movement – Brat was crowned Collins Dictionary 2024 word of the year and it even reached US politics with presidential candidate Kamala Harris giving her social media a brat rebrand.

Seven-time Brit winner Dua Lipa has received four nominations including pop act which she won last year.
List of Brit nominations in full

The contenders for the film industry’s biggest prizes this year represent a range of genres and styles. But many are united by a common thread: they take on contentious topics with ferocious energy.

A fabulous range of films has been nominated for Academy Awards this year, from a shiny Broadway musical to a fact-based South American drama, from a rollicking farce about a stripper to an impressionistic period piece set in a Florida reform school. From a distance, it might appear as if the Academy’s voters had covered just about every genre and mood that cinema has to offer. But when you look closer, it’s remarkable how many of the nominees have something in common. In their own distinctive ways, these films take on contemporary issues with enough ferocious energy to make this one of the most political selections in the history of the Oscars.
In the case of The Apprentice, the political aspect is inescapable. Ali Abbasi’s film is a controversial biopic of newly inaugurated president Donald Trump, concentrating on his years as an aspiring real-estate mogul in New York. In October, Trump denounced the film as a “cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job”. The Academy seems to have liked the film: The Apprentice received two acting nominations, one for Sebastian Stan, who plays Trump himself, and one for Jeremy Strong, who co-stars as his mentor, Roy Cohn.

An endangered plant known as the “corpse flower” for its putrid stink is blooming in Australia – and captivating the internet in the process, with thousands already tuned in to a livestream to witness its grand debut.
The titan arum plant, housed in the Royal Botanic Gardens of Sydney, blooms only once every few years for just 24 hours.
Affectionately dubbed Putricia, it will release a smell described as “wet socks, hot cat food, or rotting possum flesh”.
The long wait to see Putricia fully unfurl has spawned jokes and even a unique lingo in the livestream’s chat, with thousands commenting “WWTF”, or “We Watch the Flower”.
The livestream attracted more than 8,000 simultaneous viewers on Thursday, doubling within hours as the plant’s appearance slowly changed.
John Siemon, director of horticulture and living collections at the gardens, compared the spectacle to Sydney’s 2000 Olympics, saying “we’ve had 15,000 people come through the gates before it [the flower] even opened”.
“This specimen is around 10 years old. We acquired it from our colleagues in LA Botanic Garden at the age of three, and we’ve been nurturing it for the last seven years,” he told the BBC’s Newsday programme.
“[We’re] incredibly excited to have our first bloom in 15 years.”
After days of inaction, the view on the livestream markedly changed on Thursday as Putricia, comfortably ensconced behind a red velvet rope, began to open up.
As she continues to bloom, viewers can expect to see Putricia unfold a vibrant maroon or crimson skirt, known as a spathe, around her spadix which is the large spike in the middle of the plant.
The gardens has said it is “hard to predict exactly when” Putricia will bloom, but that has not stopped the thousands gathered online.
“I’m back again to see how Putricia is going and I can see she’s still taking her time like the queen she is, fair play,” wrote one commenter. “This is the slowest burlesque ever,” said another.
Yet another person wrote: “Overnight I watched, fell asleep, awoke, watched, fell asleep. I am weak, but Putricia is strong. WWTF.”
Other popular acronyms among viewers are WDNRP (We Do Not Rush Putricia) and BBTB (Blessed Be The Bloom).