Life > September 8, 2006

By Christopher Browder

Staff columnist

MTV’s Video Music Awards were recently held, supposedly to honor the year’s best music videos, but anyone who has ever seen the show knows that the awards don’t really matter.

The show is all about entertainment, and the actual awards take a backseat to live performances, comedians and whatever else the producers come up with that year. 

This year was no exception, and while the show was quite entertaining, there was a glaring problem with it: the acceptance speeches.

I guess an awards show has to have people accepting awards, but these self-importantly uninspired moments of musicians thanking everyone they ever met were as boring as ever.

The truth is, a good acceptance speech is hard to come by, but what is it that makes one bearable?

Artists need some rules to go by, so I came up with a few for them to follow.

1. Be aware of the award’s importance. VMA’s aren’t Grammys, and Grammys don’t really mean anything anyway. Winning a VMA is not the same as winning a Nobel Prize, so please do not act like it is.

If you win an award for “Ringtone of the Year” like Fort Minor, please do no take out a list of people to thank that includes your lawyer and distant relatives.

Seriously, Ringtone of the Year is not an artistic accomplishment.

A correct response might have been to spit on the award or at least fart in its general direction.

However, this goes both ways. If you win an award that the losers were probably disappointed about not winning, please don’t act like you have better things to do than accept the award.

As if somebody had to put a gun to your head to even attend, as in the case of Pink’s “Best Pop Video” acceptance. Being too cool for school almost always translates in being too cool for anyone to like you.

2. Have the right amount of professionalism for the occasion.

The Grammys is a black-tie industry affair, and thus, you should show up sober and well-kempt. 

While the VMAs is essentially one party, you should be able to give your acceptance speech without slurring like Pink did a few years ago when she won. 

However, a moderate amount of alcohol makes any acceptance speech more entertaining, as The All-American Rejects demonstrated, even drinking on stage and mentioning how trashed they were going to get later.

The key difference between these two events was that earlier in the night, the Rejects had performed pretty much flawlessly and deserved a stiff drink and a good time.

Thankfully for us, they got to share that good time with millions of TV viewers.

3. Don’t tell us how surprised you are that you won. After being nominated you had a 20% chance of winning statistically speaking, and your label probably paid off MTV to have you win anyway.

There are rarely surprise winners at the VMA’s, so don’t act like you’re more surprised than the audience is. Genuine humility can be good, but usually we can tell that you’ve really been practicing your speech in front of the mirror for the past week, so spare us.

4. Finally and most importantly, realize that we don’t care. We are not watching the awards to see you thank your agent or your 50 co-workers; we are watching to see actual entertainment. 

So do something different and/or amusing or get off the stage. Remember, being important can sometimes make you an award winner, but winning awards will never make you important.