fake music awards and real drama

YouTube is great for posers.

Even if you miss a huge television event, you can still run over to the water cooler the next morning and shout, "Me, too! Me, too!"

YouTube -- in tandem with DVR -- is working to erode the stigma associated with being too lazy to even pick up the remote. Or, as it happens, the stigma of choosing to refresh your Twitter page over watching the most important health care speech in 19 years.  I'm now aware that Twitter refreshes itself.

I apologize if this in-depth analysis of the Video Music Awards is a little late. But I refuse to express interest in something until it's acknowledged to be trendy by the Twitter Hashtag hot list.

I have mixed feelings about the VMAs.  On the one hand, they exemplify the biggest thing wrong with New York, which is false advertising. I rode the 'F' train around for like nine hours last week.  Not once did Taylor Swift come into my Subway car and start dancing up on me. Not once.

On the other hand, you just have to watch -- if only to try to figure out how MTV gets a three-hour ceremony out of roughly 4 awards. I don't know how they accomplish this.  All I know is that immediately upon turning off the TV I signed a year-long contract with Verizon and bought tickets for the premiere of Jennifer's Body.

So here's what I think:


Beyonce
Beyonce terrifies me. Not just because she's the Meryl Streep of the music world. Not just because her breasts are as stable as low-risk government bonds. But because she is that good.  Even though I knew she was probably reading off cue cards hastily prepared by her publicist, I teared up a bit when she gave her acceptance speech to Taylor Swift.

Kanye West
No one knows why he did it.  Now, I don't know Beyonce personally (that ingrate never returns her calls) but I imagine that for someone like Beyonce, an MTV Music Video Award is like to double-plied toilet paper. It's nice when you have it, but does it really make that much of a difference? Not really.  Then there are those of us who feel like they've won an Oscar every time they use Charmin' Ultra. But that's really none of your business.

Britney Spears
First she doesn't show up for the last episode of Total Request Live.  Now she's not in New York City to accept her much-coveted "Moonie."  Considering that she was invented in 1992 by a committee of ruthless MTV marketing experts, her no-show is quite the slight.

And then there's Lady Gaga. 

Question: how overlooked was that middle child?  Basically, she's the girl who gets arrested the night of her sister's graduation.   Except that instead of getting arrested, she's faking her own bloody demise, and instead of her sister, it's just Russell Brand shouting hoarsely into the mike for half-hour intervals.

Also, from now on I'm going to express embarrassment by saying, "Wow, now I know what Lady Gaga's dad feels like!"

The MTV Music Awards -- rewarding dizzyingly quick camera cuts and fake music since 1984.  Onward...