Never have I seen a more amusing music-related, or completely staged, award ceremony… ever.

Around five minutes ago, Anna-Nicole Smith just presented the Dissociatives (for the uninitiated - that’s Big Gay Daniel Johns of Silverchair with his Big Gay Hairy Bear Sidekick, Paul Mac) with an MTV AVMA award… topless. For a fair few minutes. Completely and obviously staged to generate a synthetic “controversial legacy” for the Australian VMAs on its very first outing.

What split my sides was the reaction from both Daniel and Paul: they had no idea how to respond to such voluptuous breasts. Daniel decided to opt for the obvious, literally bellowing: “I’ve won an award with Anna-Nicole and she’s topless, hooray!” Paul, meanwhile, sat aside and agonised over whether she was an Australian gay icon or not (answer: no, she never had any recognition over here until MTV Australia stared barking about her over the last two days). I refuse to believe she performed this stunt of her own accord, considering the MTV logo was temporary-tattooed onto her nipples.

The MTV Australian VMA’s were shameful. Granted, most of the awards went to Aussie artists, but an awful lot of awards had no nominations other than Yank rappers. Shameful. (Then again, apparently the Australian VMAs had such a large amount of yanks imported, simply so they’d stand a better chance of reselling the awards ceremony to other foreign MTV networks).

Although I don’t view MTV or Channel [V] as much as their obvious target market does (our two biggest music channels, who probably don’t play enough 90s rock for my taste - but then again, I’m aging), I fucking hope Channel [V] takes the initiative and starts their own awards. Granted, I often cringe at both MTV and [V]’s commercialism… but at least [V] far more embracingly supports both Aussie and New Zealand emerging talent (as opposed to how they can present down-under artists in the least embarassing way in order to resell them to international MTV markets). To date, Channel [V] has aligned themselves with the ARIA awards (Australia’s most “official” music awards), but I’d like to see them branch out into their own.

To be brutally honest? Let’s compare what the “Channel [V] Awards” could achieve as opposed to the “Australian” MTV Video Music Awards.

Tonight, we witnessed obviously staged “controversial” Anna-Nicole and Osbournes appearances - foreign American imports designed to generate artificial hype and controversy.

The [V] awards? We could’ve seen countless Aussie artists off their face on piss and drugs without any obvious nudging encouragement. Even Delta, for Christ’s sake. It’s not even worth naming bands because every fucking Aussie band ever would happily present/accept an Aussie music award.

Fuck the Aussie MTV Video Music Awards to hell, and I’m glad it pissed down in uncharacteristically non-Sydney thunderstorm weather tonight onto the “red carpet” this evening. My dearest hope is that the press rips this apart for what it is tomorrow: a global reselling of a photocopied, franchised American event, passing itself off as a “local” social highlight. MTV importing the Osbournes to (predictably) continually mispronounce (and giggle over) our major artists’ surnames was a complete waste of money, and I hope they pay the price.

Bring on the annual Channel [V] awards.

PS: totally pissed blind and angry while I write this, apologies in advance for glaring spelling/grammar omissions.

Update: SMH has posted an opinion piece on this.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 3rd, 2005 at 10:55 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.