Finding silver linings in 2020 isn’t easy, but here are a few winners in what’s so far been a losing year
Hindsight is 2020 and no one can wait to put this lousy year in the rearview mirror.
While there have been a lot of losers, there have been winners too, all things being relative. In the first half of the year, those who struck early were lucky.
The Kansas City Chiefs and sudden-star quarterback Patrick Mahomes got in under the wire by winning the Super Bowl on Feb. 2. They remain the only professional sports team to win a championship this year. Until the sporting world gets back to normal, the Chiefs are 2020′s only big league champs.
Though his New England Patriots didn’t win a title and lost aging franchise quarterback Tom Brady, team owner Robert Kraft had a good year. The 79-year-old billionaire somewhat cleaned up his image as an erotic massage enthusiast whose team cheats by sending his private plane to China to retrieve 1.2 surgical masks to protect medical workers from COVID-19. He then sent a semi-truck full of the lifesaving face guards to New York City, where football fans have not been kind to him and his fans.
Speaking of fans, if there are no spectators when Major League Baseball resumes, the cheating Houston Astros will be spared the relentless booing and taunting that awaited them in Yankee Stadium and other road ballparks.
It was also a good year for burned-out hicks who raise tigers, so long as they had a deal with Netflix.
“Tiger King” was the right show at the right time when it played to a captive audience at the start of the pandemic after its March 20 debut. Whether or not roadside zoo operator Joe “Exotic” Maldonado-Passage would have been a household name in a time when people could go outside is anyone’s guess. But it seems quite likely that the 57-year-old performer, who is serving a 22-year prison sentence for soliciting murder, will have to wait a while before he has another year as good as this one, where his 15 minutes of fame seemed to last a lifetime.
The entertainment world rewarded people with teeth in 2020, too.
Hollywood’s biggest prize went to “Parasite” — a Korean film that became the first foreign language flick to score an Academy Award win for best picture. Director Bong Joon-ho’s tongue-in-cheek look at classism, an instant talker, took on greater significance in an era of xenophobia and wealth disparity.
That didn’t translate well with President Trump, who asked a crowd in Colorado “What the hell was that all about?” then wondered aloud if it was good movie. The president said he longed for “Gone with the Wind” — whose glorification of slavery prompted HBO max to pull the picture until it put together a disclaimer to run before showings.
“Fight Club” actor Brad Pitt also had a big 2020 that saw him score a best supporting actor Oscar for his role as a stuntman rumored to have killed his wife in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” where he also roughed up a character playing Bruce Lee.
It was a big comeback year for Pitt, who’d suddenly split from actress Angelina Jolie in 2016 following a heated confrontation on a private jet, the details of which remain a mystery. While sleazy tabloids like the National Enquirer defended Pitt with a dubious 2018 cover claiming “The Kids Choose Brad,” Jolie stayed quiet prior to an interview with Vogue India published this week, where she said “I separated for the well-being of my family ... It was the right decision. I continue to focus on their healing.”
Gov. Andrew Cuomo, meanwhile, became the Brad Pitt of Albany as New Yorkers looked for leadership at the outset of the pandemic. Professional matchmaker Maureen Tara Nelson told the Daily News the 62-year-old politician and his younger brother Chris Cuomo, a CNN anchor, ranked as two of the nation’s most sought-after men in a survey taken by her clients.
The elder Cuomo responded on 1010 WINS by making clear that not only is he single — he’s also the only game in town, because Chris is married.
“However — I am eligible,” he said.
SiriusXM host Howard Stern got serious in 2020, telling locked-in listeners that his longtime guest Donald Trump desperately wants to be loved by the showbiz community and secretly hates the MAGA cap-wearing zealots who support his presidency. That assessment went viral after being shared by celebs including Mia Farrow and D.L. Hughley.
According to Stern, many of his longtime listeners have started tuning in again since his subscription-based radio network made its programming free on March 31 to break up the monotony for the homebound.
Chinese zodiac watchers will say it’s the Year of the Rat, but a lot of dogs are enjoying having their locked-in families home spoiling them all spring and in many cases, into the summer. For dog owners, there isn’t much else to do other than taking the pups to the park.
Strolling through a grocery store during a pandemic is certainly no fun and with many restaurants closed, food delivery services have been busier than ever. It’s hard to imagine many people closed their FreshDirect accounts during the pandemic, but new customers signed up.
And if you make toilet paper, you cleaned up, since pandemic-panicked patrons plucked it off store shelves. Never mind that the panic created local shortages while TP makers kept churning out single- and double-ply paper gold, sheet after sheet and roll after roll.
Lady Gaga has had a monster 2020 already, thanks to her new album, “Chromatica,” which became the singer’s sixth recording to reach the top spot on Billboard’s charts. Pushing the album’s release date from April 10 to May 29 on account of the COVID-19 outbreak did stop the Upper West Side native from hitting No. 1.
In politics, we won’t know who won big until the November elections. In the meantime, it seems the president’s former national security adviser scored big in the short term by laying low, then cashing in.
Not only did John Bolton avoid testifying in the 45th president’s impeachment hearings, which started in late 2019 and ended abruptly in 2020, the 71-year-old reportedly received a $2 million advance and was one of the most sought-after interviews of the summer.
Sure, the hawkish conservative finds himself a man without a country after being labeled a greedy coward by Democrats and a smarmy backstabber by Trump supporters. But he walked away with 500 pages of revenge against his former boss of 17 months and enough cash to ride out the pandemic in style.
A lawsuit against the mustached scribe could reverse his fortunes. He’s hardly the only American wondering what the second half of 2020 has in store.
