Taylor Swift Is Getting an Award for Directing Her Own Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe
The VMAs are giving Swift their first-ever Artist Director Honors, adding a very on-brand trophy to an already absurd collection of Moon Persons.
Taylor Swift is about to receive an award for doing what Taylor Swift has been doing for years: turning her own mythology into a fully staffed visual department.
At the MTV Video Music Awards on Sept. 27, Swift will be honored with the inaugural Artist Director Honors, a new prize for a musician “whose work behind the camera has expanded the possibilities of music video and advanced the art of visual storytelling,” according to the network’s announcement. Naturally, she is also up for nine more awards, including Video of the Year for “The Fate of Ophelia,” because apparently one cannot simply attend a Taylor Swift awards show. One must build a small awards-season subplot around her.
The honor arrives as Swift is tied with Beyoncé for the most VMAs in history, with 30 wins, and already owns five Video of the Year trophies. It is less a random career footnote than the latest chapter in a slow, highly controlled shift: Swift stopped treating the music video as promotional material and started treating it like another room in the house of her work.
The director’s chair was hiding in plain sight
Swift’s filmmaking era did not arrive out of nowhere, even if the industry-friendly language around it makes it sound like a delightful creative surprise. She first co-directed “Mine” with Roman White in 2010, then spent years writing the scripts and shaping the worlds around her songs before officially taking the solo director’s chair.
That turning point came with “The Man” in 2020, a concept built around Swift being prosthetically transformed into a man and moving through life with the privileges and swagger she wanted to examine. In a 2022 interview with Variety, Swift said she had wanted a female director for the project, but the directors she contacted were booked. The practical problem became a career pivot.
“It actually came out of necessity,” she said at the time.
There is something extremely Taylor about that origin story: the door was closed, so she redesigned the entire hallway. What began as a logistical obstacle became another lane in the Swift empire, one where she could write the concept, control the visual language and decide exactly how much of the joke, heartbreak or Easter-egg density made it onto the screen.
Since “The Man,” Swift has directed more than 15 projects, according to E! News, including “All Too Well: The Short Film,” the extended visual version of her fan-favorite breakup song. That project went on to win Best Music Video at the 2023 Grammys, giving the directing experiment an industry-shaped exclamation point.
From “Bad Blood” to “All Too Well,” the VMAs have been part of the story
Swift’s relationship with the VMAs has always had a little more voltage than a standard awards-show résumé. Her first Video of the Year win came for “Bad Blood,” the sleek, star-packed revenge fantasy featuring Lena Dunham, Zendaya and Selena Gomez. It was a landmark moment for Swift’s visual world-building: the song was one thing, but the video arrived with a cast, a color palette and enough interpersonal drama to make the entire thing feel like a franchise launch.
She won Video of the Year again for “You Need to Calm Down” in 2019, then for “All Too Well: The Short Film” in 2022, “Anti-Hero” in 2023 and “Fortnight” in 2024. The list maps a fascinating evolution. “Bad Blood” was pop spectacle. “You Need to Calm Down” was candy-colored message pop. “All Too Well” made the music video feel more like a miniature film. “Anti-Hero” turned self-loathing into surreal comedy. “Fortnight” leaned into the melancholy, high-design strangeness of Swift’s later visual language.
The new Artist Director Honors, then, is not just celebrating that she has made a lot of videos. It is recognizing the fact that the videos have become part of the main event. With Swift, the camera is rarely just documenting the song. It is extending the song’s universe, adding characters and symbols, and giving fans another surface to examine, remix and argue over in group chats.
She did not set out to become a director. She just kept doing it.
Swift has described directing as something she never actively pursued. Her original ambition, she said, was storytelling: stories, poetry and songs. Directing grew naturally from that impulse, then became more fulfilling the further she went.
“The more I did it, the more I loved it,” she said.
That sentence is almost comically clean as a career thesis. Swift writes. Swift performs. Swift produces a visual world. Swift discovers she likes another part of the machine. Swift eventually receives the first award created to honor artists who do exactly that. Somewhere, a mood board is being framed.
The timing also gives this particular trophy a little extra pop. Swift has just entered another giant public chapter, having married Travis Kelce earlier this year according to E! News, while remaining one of the VMAs’ most decorated and repeatedly nominated figures. Her personal life may generate the loudest headlines, but her professional story keeps expanding in a quieter, more deliberate way: songwriter to pop megastar, performer to architect, subject of the spectacle to person directing the camera.
And that may be the most interesting thing about this honor. Swift is not being rewarded simply for appearing in her videos, or for being famous enough to turn a three-minute release into an international event. She is being recognized for the part fans have been watching her claim in real time: the authority behind the frame.
Of course, she will still have nine chances to collect more hardware on the night. The VMAs are not known for understatement, and neither is the Swift awards-industrial complex. But the Artist Director Honors has a different flavor from another trophy for another chart-topping performance. It says the person building the world deserves as much attention as the person standing inside it.
For Taylor Swift, that is a very fitting new title: not just the star of the movie, but increasingly, the one calling “action.”
CT Tamburello and Phaedra Parks Went From “Just Friends” to Reality TV’s Most Unexpected Soft Launch
The Traitors costars are now talking peace, opposites attracting and a red-carpet debut—after CT once insisted the romance was fans’ “wishful thinking.”
Reality television has given us many things: lifelong feuds, suspiciously coordinated vacations and at least one wedding where everyone involved appeared to be wearing a microphone. But CT Tamburello and Phaedra Parks quietly becoming a couple? That is the kind of plot twist that makes you put your phone down and say, “Wait. Them?”
Two weeks after Parks confirmed that she and her The Traitors costar were in a relationship, Tamburello offered his own characteristically careful update. “I’ll say—I don’t want to jinx it—but I’ll say we’re in a good place,” he told Us Weekly in an interview published Sept. 20. Then came the line that turned a reality-TV romance into a full cultural mood board: “With her, she just brings peace. It’s easy to just stay calm around her.”
Peace is not necessarily the first word associated with either half of this pairing. Parks built her legend on the verbal precision of a woman who can turn a dinner-party argument into a closing statement. Tamburello, meanwhile, is a longtime Challenge competitor whose résumé includes physical eliminations, emotional turmoil and enough reality-show history to qualify as its own cinematic universe.
And yet, somehow, the pairing makes sense. She is polished, funny and courtroom-sharp. He is blunt, self-deprecating and apparently aware that his natural setting is not always “serene.” The internet did not invent the chemistry. It simply noticed it before they were ready to name it.
The Traitors did what the pods, beaches and villas could not
Tamburello and Parks first met while filming season two of The Traitors in 2023. The show was designed to make everyone suspicious of everyone else, which is not usually the ideal environment for a budding romance. You are either banishing people, lying to your friends or staring across a castle at someone who may be secretly plotting your elimination.
Still, the connection lingered. When fans began shipping them, Tamburello initially waved it away. “I think that’s more wishful thinking,” he told E! News, adding that they had shared laughs and fun but were, at the time, only friends. It was a sensible answer, if not a particularly convincing one to viewers who had already decided the two had a certain something.
Now the story has changed. Parks confirmed the relationship, and Tamburello is describing a bond that feels less like a reality-show stunt and more like an unexpectedly calming detour. He said they balance each other well and joked, “I know I’m crazy in my own right. It’s probably for the best if I’m not around her every day, to be honest.”
That is not exactly a hard launch with matching captions and a sunset yacht photo. It is more interesting: a soft launch with emotional specificity. He is not merely saying she is amazing. He is saying she brings peace, and that being around her feels easy. In celebrity relationship language, that is practically a sonnet.
Enter Paula Abdul, stage left
To explain the dynamic, Tamburello reached for Paula Abdul’s “Opposites Attract,” the 1989 pop hit whose video paired Abdul with the animated MC Skat Kat. “You remember that old video?” he asked. “That’s us.”
It is an inspired comparison for several reasons. First, it is charmingly old-school. Second, it acknowledges that the pairing looks improbable from the outside. Third, it gives the relationship a built-in choreography: two people moving in different directions, occasionally colliding, somehow making it work.
Tamburello even extended the metaphor, saying they sometimes take “two steps forward and two steps back.” That sounds less like a promise that everything is perfectly settled and more like an honest description of two adults navigating a new relationship while the public watches, comments and turns every glance into a slideshow.
He also hinted that he has learned to keep some things private. “Contrary to popular belief, I do learn,” he teased, before adding that some things are better left unsaid and that oversharing can be a bad thing. For a man whose personal life has unfolded across multiple reality franchises, this may be the most mature plot development of all.
From “wishful thinking” to the Emmy carpet
The timing makes the romance especially satisfying for reality-TV spectators. Their connection began in the pressure cooker of The Traitors, survived the period when both parties publicly framed it as platonic and then arrived in the real world with enough momentum for a red-carpet debut.
Tamburello and Parks made that debut together at the 2026 Creative Primetime Emmys on Sept. 5. A red carpet does not automatically transform a relationship into a forever commitment, but it does move a couple out of the “maybe they’re just friends” zone and into the “yes, people are going to examine every inch of this interaction” zone.
It also gives their romance a particularly delicious reality-TV symmetry. Parks has spent years navigating the social theater of The Real Housewives of Atlanta and the strategic chaos of The Traitors. Tamburello has made a career out of surviving alliances, betrayals and challenges that appear to have been designed by someone with a personal grudge against knees. They met in a game built on deception and now seem to be trying something much simpler: seeing whether the calm lasts when nobody is voting.
For Tamburello, this relationship arrives after a period he previously described as a reset—focusing on himself, work, his son and getting his head right. He has also been publicly associated with the end of his marriage to Catalina White in 2024. Parks, 52, brings her own long public history, including her years on reality television and her previous marriage to Apollo Nida. Neither has presented this new relationship as a finished fairy tale, and Tamburello’s “good place” language leaves room for the fact that they are still figuring it out.
That unfinished quality is part of the appeal. Celebrity couples are often introduced to us at maximum volume: coordinated outfits, matching declarations, a vacation carousel and a caption about choosing each other every day. CT and Phaedra are offering something more entertainingly restrained. A little peace. A little teasing. A Paula Abdul reference. One red carpet. And the delicious knowledge that the couple everyone was told not to see may have been standing right there the whole time.
Presley Gerber’s Death at 27 Brings a Family’s Private Crisis Into Public View
A 911 dispatch audio recording obtained by Page Six adds new detail to the model’s death at a California rehab facility, where an automated call referenced cardiac arrest and overdose.
Presley Gerber’s death has already landed with the particular shock reserved for people who seemed to have been born inside the camera flash. He was the son of supermodel Cindy Crawford and businessman Rande Gerber, the younger brother of model Kaia Gerber, and a model in his own right. He was 27.
Now, a 911 dispatch recording obtained by Page Six is bringing more detail — and more discomfort — to a story the family had asked the public to treat with privacy. In the audio, an automated voice can be heard saying “cardiac arrest” and “overdose.” The address given on the call matches the California rehab facility where Gerber was staying.
According to Page Six, an operator is then heard apparently upgrading the call. A source on the scene told the outlet that police, ambulance crews and firefighters responded, with authorities remaining there for roughly three hours. The dispatch audio does not provide a complete account of what happened, but it makes the setting of Gerber’s final hours painfully clear: not a nightclub, not a red carpet, not some glossy Hollywood after-party — a recovery facility in the Los Angeles area.
The kind of news that changes a family’s public image overnight
Gerber’s death was first reported as a suspected overdose at the rehab facility on Sept. 20. Page Six said he had been living with several people in a sober house on the grounds of the center. His family later confirmed his death in a joint statement that asked for privacy during what they described as a “very difficult and painful time.”
That request carries a different weight when the family is as recognizable as this one. Crawford and Rande Gerber have spent decades moving through public life with an unusually polished ease: fashion campaigns, business launches, celebrity friendships and the kind of family photographs that made their Los Angeles household feel both impossibly glamorous and, at times, deliberately normal.
Presley was never simply “a celebrity child,” though the label followed him. He worked as a model, appearing in fashion campaigns and stepping into the same visual universe that made his mother one of the most famous faces of the supermodel era. His sister Kaia, now 25, followed Crawford into modeling and acting. Together, the siblings became a familiar shorthand for inherited fashion-world cool — a second-generation dynasty with excellent bone structure and an even better family photo.
That image can make grief feel strangely public. The audience recognizes the family mythology long before it knows anything about the private pain inside it. Suddenly, old appearances and final photographs are being reconsidered, not because they reveal a secret, but because celebrity culture trains people to search backward once a life has ended.
A dispatch call turns a headline into a human emergency
There is a grimly bureaucratic quality to emergency audio. The language is clipped, automated and stripped of all the things a family would know about a person: his jokes, his habits, his complicated history, the people who loved him. “Cardiac arrest” and “overdose” arrive as dispatch terms, not a biography.
That contrast is part of what makes the recording so jarring. Gerber’s name carries fashion gloss, but the call itself is about an emergency unfolding behind the walls of a treatment center. The responders’ presence, the apparent escalation of the call and the hours authorities spent at the scene suggest the seriousness of the crisis without offering the public a neat explanation for it.
And there is no neat explanation here. Addiction and overdose are not plot twists that can be decoded from one recording. A rehab facility is not a punchline or a scandalous location; it is a place people go when they are trying to survive something. The fact that Gerber was there makes his death especially heartbreaking, because it places him inside an effort to get better — without pretending that seeking help guarantees a simple or immediate ending.
The wording around his death also matters. Page Six described the overdose as suspected, while the dispatch audio includes the word “overdose.” Those details belong to the developing account of the incident, not a full public explanation of the circumstances. Authorities have not, in the material provided here, released a complete account.
The last public image is never the whole story
Page Six previously reported that Gerber had embraced his parents in a final public appearance. That image will now be read as a farewell, even though it was not necessarily made with that meaning in mind. This is one of celebrity culture’s cruelest habits: turning ordinary moments into symbolic ones after the fact.
A hug becomes a clue. A family outing becomes “the last time.” A recent photograph acquires a cinematic sadness it may never have carried in real time. The people in it are asked to perform an ending they could not have known was coming.
For Crawford, Rande Gerber and Kaia, the public history is unavoidable, but the private loss is theirs. The family’s statement did not offer a polished narrative, a grand tribute or an explanation designed for public consumption. It asked for space. That is a rare thing in an ecosystem built on access, especially when the person at the center came from one of fashion and entertainment’s most visible families.
Gerber’s death is now being discussed through the language of dispatch calls, rehab facilities and suspected overdose. But before the headline, he was a son, a brother and a young man whose life extended far beyond the most searchable facts about him. The audio may add detail to the emergency response. It cannot tell us who he was to the people waiting for him to come home.
In a culture that loves a glamorous family story until it suddenly wants the darkest chapter, that distinction is worth holding onto.