MTV should change their names to the “Bleeeeeeeeeep” Awardless Award show and start just dunking adult actors like witches or Coney Island freaks. Why not? And how can you not love that Tom Cruise has made the foul-mouthed coked-up greed-championing Jewish producer-type into a stock comic expression of nothing less than the highest level of Nietzschean ubermenschood in the form of his TROPIC THUNDER role, Les Grossman? I applaud MTV Movie Awards for the way soul manifests itself deep in the heart of gleefully self-reflexive marketing. Movies presumably from companies under MTV’s same parental-corporate umbrella are announced as hits even before they’re released, unknowns on shows not seen til next fall are introduced as if they’re already major stars, and yet, if you look deep in the subtext, it’s a giant self-skewering by early 40s creative honchos aimed at pleasing the younger generation; its pratfalls aimed at making kids laugh writ large upon the faux-Oscar stage. It’s delighted by its own sham-iness; its self-aware self-promotion run up into the Warholian reverse-abyss of overabundant image. Giant faces come roaring down on the little people onstage from mammoth video screens, like a the 1984 Big Brother version of a Dean Martin Celebrity Roast.
The awards themselves look like crap, like a bunch of cheap gold plated chain jewelry piled into a large size soda cup, and the jokes fall flat as crack addicts after a huge hit. Commercials are incorporated so seamlessly into the show you can’t really tell when you’re not being pitched to, even as the whole entertainment world seems to be getting chewed up before your very eyes.
If the Oscars are the “end” of the movie world digestive tract, then MTV Movie Awards are its beginning, all chewing and slurping and turning Disney Club members into sexythangs and on into adult stars before our disbelieving eyes. It’s a world where you can tell no one’s getting any real sex anymore because all they can talk about is their dicks and their heart-shaped boxes, and they curse like the last straight sailor left at sea. It’s the teenager equivalent of an adult winning a kid’s love by allowing 4 pounds of green slime to be dumped on their head from above ala Nickelodeon. (We cut only to a distraught looking Christophe Waltz when that blonde pisher from Harry Potter wins best villain. Take that, over 30-somethings!)
Then there’s a little thing called the MTV Movie Awards Lesbian Lipstick kiss. Scarlett Johanssen is kept onscreen waiting like a June bride for Sandra Bullock to step up for her “Generations” Award. (I.e. to older actors that connect to the current mob of Bieber-huffers) and then they fumble their way to one of the most uninspired, forced, nervous anticlimactic kisses in the history of lipstick lesbian award show kissery. Here’s a suggestion for a future show if you want to push it up a notch into boy-au-boy territory in a best kiss competition: Les Grossman and Tom Cruise! Instead of showing last night’s moment of Johanssen disgrace I shall just flash another shot of the unforgettable, decade defining moment from 2003:
But these are quibbles. The main thing: after last night I have no more negative ink left in my blood to spill on Tom Cruise. He’s won my bold Fenian heart with his ability to dance like the wind in a fat suit and still end up sweating less than his partner by the end of the performance, Jennifer Lopez, wearing almost nothing.
Somewhere up there in MTV-land are brilliant writers and producers, agents and actors who aren’t afraid to let their coiffed images explode into hyper-self-satirizing bluster and self-negating comedic fury. Yes, there were some really ugly glitter-stockings floating around that made ever woman wearing them look like the frumpiest ballerina at the ball, but it was worth it to swoon in the absolute lack of laughter that greeted the lame-duck jokes of the Adam Sandler-David Spade posse, THE GROWN-UPS! And of course, Kristen Stewart, looking as wan and dazed as if she’s had no porridge. And of course, had you any doubt in the pro-wrestling world of Teams Edward and Wolf-Boy, Robert Pattinson deuced it! Don’t ask the lady to choose, cuz it’ll be him!! Balance is restored; white dude got his groove back… from the Injuns! Whoop! Whoop!
