By Jonathan Landrum Jr., Entertainment Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) --With a new Super Bowl ad, "Top Gun: Maverick" star Miles Teller and his wife, Keleigh, are trying to remind viewers that sometimes in life's trying moments, you can choose to make the best of things.
The couple star in a commercial for Bud Light, where they dance to customer-service hold music. Miles said the ad's message to choose joy appealed to him.
"Obviously there's a lot of stuff that's kind of going on that can be really frustrating, but I think you can choose happiness," he said. "You can choose enjoyment."
"They said, 'Look, we really just want this to feel like a slice of life moment," said the actor. "We both felt like this would be something that we'd be proud to show our kids." They also kept casting in the family by using their actual dog for cute reaction shots of their antics.
Miles' dance moves should come as no surprise. He appeared in the 2011 "Footloose" remake, in the role originated by Chris Penn.
Keleigh, on the other hand, confesses to feeling "super nervous" beforehand but says they were given "a lot of freedom to just play around. I really enjoyed the process."
Besides bragging rights about appearing in a Super Bowl ad — "they're the Super Bowl of commercials," says Miles — he hopes an additional perk would be a lifetime supply of Bud Light, which hasn't been confirmed but he's still hoping comes to fruition. "I said 'Look, guys, we don't need to write this down in a contract or anything, but I feel like it was kind of like implied that I would never pay for a Bud Light again,' which is perfectly fine by me."
As a self-professed "diehard birds fan," he's also invested in the match-up between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles, which Keleigh says makes for "a big week" in their house, describing it as "a whole situation."
Up next is the Oscars, where "Top Gun: Maverick" is nominated for best picture. Miles says he believes "100%" that Tom Cruise should have been nominated in the best actor category.
"We give actors so much credit in movies for performing skills, for playing instruments or singing or gaining weight and losing weight and the skills that Tom is putting on display in 'Top Gun' and so many of his movies — that's a product of thousands of hours practiced. I think we don't realize how much work and effort goes into that."
The Grammys’ voting body is more diverse, with 66% new members. What does it mean for the awards?
For years, the Grammy Awards have been criticized over a lack of diversity — artists of color and women left out of top prizes; rap and contemporary R&B stars ignored — a reflection of the Recording Academy's electorate. An evolving voting body, 66% of whom have joined in the last five years, is working to remedy that.
At last year's awards, women dominated the major categories; every televised competitive Grammy went to at least one woman. It stems from a commitment the Recording Academy made five years ago: In 2019, the Academy announced it would add 2,500 women to its voting body by 2025. Under the Grammys' new membership model, the Recording Academy has surpassed that figure ahead of the deadline: More than 3,000 female voting members have been added, it announced Thursday.
"It's definitely something that we're all very proud of," Harvey Mason jr., academy president and CEO, told The Associated Press. "It tells me that we were severely underrepresented in that area."
Reform at the Record Academy dates back to the creation of a task force focused on inclusion and diversity after a previous CEO, Neil Portnow, made comments belittling women at the height of the #MeToo movement.
Since 2019, approximately 8,700 new members have been added to the voting body. In total, there are now more than 16,000 members and more than 13,000 of them are voting members, up from about 14,000 in 2023 (11,000 of which were voting members). In that time, the academy has increased its number of members who identify as people of color by 63%.
"It's not an all-new voting body," Mason assures. "We're very specific and intentional in who we asked to be a part of our academy by listening and learning from different genres and different groups that... Read More