What Selena Gomez said to Taylor Swift and Keleigh Teller at the Golden Globes is the biggest celebrity gossip story of 2024 so far. Because of lipreading. 

 

As we all know by now, Selena went over to Taylor’s table to spill some tea, prompting Keleigh to respond “with Timothée?”, followed by a Selena smug head nod, and followed then by the Taylor and Keleigh open-mouth lean-back – a moment now immortalised on social media. 

 

Amateur lipreaders immediately concluded that Selena was telling Taylor and Keleigh that she asked her friend, Timothée Chalamet, to take a photo with her, but that Kylie Jenner shut it down. Over the last couple of days, sources from all sides have tried to deny that this is actually what happened. Yesterday the paparazzi straight up asked Timmy about the situation and he said “of course” he and Selena are still cool and answered “no” when asked if there’s beef between Selena and Kylie – you can watch the video here.

 

Selena also jumped into the comment section of the E! News Instagram account: 

Selena comments on E!'s Instagram post

“Noooooo I told Taylor about two of my friends who hooked up. Not that that’s anyone business.”

 

I’m not sure anyone believes this because Keleigh can be heard, clearly, saying “with Timothée?” and, I mean, it’s too much of a coincidence for them to be talking about another Timothée/y. But now Selena’s on another social media break and they’re all trying to make this go away. Taylor, meanwhile, was back in New York yesterday and seen at Electric Lady Studio, and she her bounce-out from this mess is going to be quick, because of course Travis Kelce and Kansas City are in the playoffs and will play the Miami Dolphins in the wild card game on Saturday night. If and when she shows up in KC that night, nobody’s going to be talking about what did or didn’t go down at the Globes anymore. By now all of these people should be familiar with how this works – attention spans are increasingly short, you can always count on gossip whiplash. 

Case in point, there’s already another potential lipreading scandal that’s gone viral, this time starring Emily Blunt and John Krasinski: 

@cbs

Date night? #EmilyBlunt #JohnKrasinski #GoldenGlobes

♬ original sound - CBS
 

Some people think John is saying, “I can’t wait to divorce” which… 

LOL FOREVER. 

Other lipreaders have countered that what he’s actually saying is, “I can’t wait to get indoors”. But you know how it is now – people will see what they want to see, they will read the lips that they want to read, and you won’t be able to convince them otherwise and it will then snowball into speculation that Emily and John are breaking up soon. 

It’s f-cking absurd. But this is where we are now. This is how social media users are generating gossip and, in many ways, degrading the purity of it! 

And what will the impact be? Have you ever watched an Asian award show? Celebrities at Asian award shows barely talk to each other. If they do, they often cover their mouths – because this lipreading sh-t has been an epidemic over in East Asia for a while now… and it’s caused so much controversy and manufactured so much mess that in order to protect themselves, Asian stars are spend most of their time at these events mute and expressionless or partially covering their faces so that they can’t be accused of saying what they never said. This is the future we could be headed towards in the west. 

We're talking about this on The Squawk (app link here).