Wednesday, June 8, 2011

MTV Movie awards.../why on earth does this happen

I haven't posted in forever, I'm a terrible blogger, etc, etc, etc.

But the MTV Movie awards just happened, and I have some stuff to say.

I did not watch the movie awards, but while it was happening I happened to look at a live feed online of what movies were winning. And I was upset.

Granted, some good things did happen--for instance, my favorite actress Chloe Grace Moretz winning Best Breakout Star as well as Biggest Badass, two things that are incredibly true. Yay! Also, Emma Stone won for best comedic performance in Easy A, and I love her and that movie as well so that was also good.

HOWEVER.  The thing that really upset me was that The Twilight Saga: Eclipse won Best Movie of the Year.

Wait: it gets worse.

Kristen Stewart also won for best female performance, beating out fellow nominees Emma Stone, Emma Watson, Jennifer Aniston, and Natalie Portman who WON THE OSCAR in case anybody missed that. Just to fill out the prom court in as stereotypical a way as possible, Robert Pattinson also won Best Male Performance,  over his fellow supernatural beings Taylor Lautner and Daniel Radcliffe, but also his fellow teen hearthrob Zac Effron, and, most surprisingly (though should it be?) Jesse Eisenberg. Pattinson and Stewart also won Best Kiss, (triumphing over Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis, among others,) and, most upsettingly, Pattinson, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Xavier Samuels won Best Fight. Seriously? Not Chloe Grace Moretz beating the living daylights out of a grown man drug dealer? Not Joseph Gordon-Levitt beating the living daylights out of some guy while upside down? Are you kidding me?

Confession time, I have not seen Eclipse, so I don't know anything about it's merit or lack thereof, but I think it says something very strange about MTV Movie awards. With nominees including multiple Oscar winners as well as two of the most money making themes of the film decade--Harry Potter and Christopher Nolan--it's incomprehensible that Eclipse won nearly fifty percent of the awards. (38%, to be exact, 5 out of 13.)

Some questions come up, one in particular--who decides who wins these things? Who is voting? Is it the MTV audiences? Is it the washed up celebrities who attend the evening?

According to Wikipedia, the "general public" is voting through a link on the MTV website, which now is rather difficult to get to but before the show was probably on display on the  home page. So...it is indeed people who watch MTV who voted for this, but more importantly, people who spend their free time browsin' around the MTV website. ...yeah.  (Note: the nominees are chosen by some apparently arbitrary excecutives at MTV.)

Time to make grand assumptions! I know when I had time to browse around television networks websites, I was about thirteen years old. Maybe fourteen. I know that those years were also the only time in my life where I watched MTV regularly, (oh geez. Not especially regularly. I watched "Next" sometimes on Saturday mornings. I'm not proud. Don't judge me,) and the same goes for my little brother. I also know, or can infer, that it is mostly middle school girls who like Twilight so much, because, as I've said, that is when I liked Twilight.

So...can we extrapolate that MTV's main audience is, in fact, middle school girls? Yes?

Further research should be done on this subject, for MTV's sake, because they mostly advertise to what I can only imagine some statistics have shown is their target audience--college aged people, mostly men, who are not, in fact, in college. Their commercials are mostly for late-night flavored Doritos and Axe that makes you smell like you don't have a hangover and colleges that you can go to online if you pay them hundreds of billions of dollars.

We have some indiscrepancies here. The people voting for these movie things, (the "Golden Popcorn Awards) are so clearly middle schoolers, and yet MTV is perfectly successful targeting its programming towards older people. And I haven't even mentioned TV shows, but perhaps if I look into that i can find a common theme.....

On MTV on any given day (today), we have a healthy helping of "hot" and "Killer" music videos, followed by the Reese Witherspoon chick flick, Uptown Girls (on Sunday, Witherspoon one the MTVMA's equivalent of a lifetime acheivement award.) After that we get into our daily dose of teen pregnancy, with some Teen Mom followed by some Sixteen and Pregnant: Where are they now? (which I thought was the premise of Teen Mom, but whatever.) Next is what appears to be some reruns of Teen Wolf, then a re-run of the awards, then a mixture of Real World XXX, Jackass, That 70's Show,  and just a little bit more Sixteen and Pregnant until midnight.

MTV. Such classy programming for our 12-24 year olds.

The question now is, who is watching these shows? And the answer is easy, but unfortunately leads us in an unpleasant circle of teen romance: the same people who watch twilight, for the most part. Teen Wolf is an immediate Twilight parallel, which was worth giving two hours of afternoon time, and the teen pregnancy shows, more subtly, share the common themes of acting like you're an adult when you're in high school and also having terrible creepy boyfriends. Twlight fans watch MTV, Twilight fans vote for award.

Who are they? I don't know....

also, this is a pretty great and relevant article from the (I think usually) wonderful Film School Rejects. He swears a little bit but articulates his point well...MTV is catering to their target audience, which clearly has to be sixteen year old girls. Regardless, this is upsetting, because not long ago I was a sixteen year old girl and the smart ones should not have the misfortune of being surrounded by people with such dreadful tastes in pop culture and media.

In my opinion.

1 comment:

  1. There are a lot of things that happen at the MTV movie awards that are not well, Oscar worthy. I don't pay much attention like I do to the more important award shows. I recently found out my company Dish Network bought Blockbuster which made me happy for two simple reasons, one it was not being liquidated like most corporations would have done. http://goo.gl/wuMrN Two, I now have access to my blogging material old movies that were adapted from books. I love to do the three step process, read the book, watch the movie and blog. But usually I have to return the movie right away and that makes it difficult but now I can keep it due to no due date and no late fees. This allows me to study the book and movie more closely and write my blog more to my original plan. I'm super excited about it. Thanks for letting me rant!

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