The 2008 MTV Movie Awards: No Country for Thinking Young Men
This just in for cineastes. Check out the nominations for the 2008 MTV Movie Awards, with prizes for the best in cinema to be doled out live on June 1st, hosted by the Love Guru himself, Mike Myers. There Will Be Blood Oscar winner Daniel Day Lewis can go drink his milkshake. Not a nod for his film, or his role-of-a-lifetime performance. He was crowded out of the Best Actor category by stiff competition from Michael Cera in Juno and Shia LeBeouf in Transformers. Maybe next year, Danny Boy.
What you’ve gotta love about the MTV movie stakes, celebrating 16 years of laughing at Oscar’s ass, is the refreshing way it laughs at itself. Maybe it’s time to laugh back or, judging from this year’s movie crop, just give in and go with the idiot flow. The MTV Movie AwardS have some of the most playful categories ever, including Best Fight (my vote goes to Matt Damon vs. Joey Ansah in The Bourne Ultimatum) and Best Kiss (Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry Potter getting it on with Katie Leung is priceless). It’s all about mainstream pandering. The more money a movie makes, the more likely it’ll be up for MTV honors. That means out with Oscar winner No Country for Old Men and underperformers such as Michael Clayton, Into the Wild, Gone Baby Gone, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. And forget about documentaries, for MTV they don’t exist.
But here’s the thing. The awards, voted on by fans who visit MovieAwards.MTV.com, can often give props to fun flicks that the snotty Academy won’t let in the club. For example, here are the five MTV nominees for Best Movie:
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
I Am Legend
Juno
Superbad
The first two are beneath contempt. The third is a scrappy Will Smith effort if you can ignore the final 20 minutes. The fourth actually won an Oscar nod for Best Picture. And the fifth, Superbad, is a terrific teen comedy the Academy stupidly sneered at. In fact, Superbad led every film in nominations, scoring for Best Movie, Best Comedic Performance (Jonah Hill), and hitting a trifecta for Best Newcomer — Hill, Michael Cera and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who played the immortal McLovin.
So think pleasure — guilty or not — and pick the Best Movie of last year that entertained you the most without ever trying to make you a better person. Why is it I can’t stop thinking about McLovin?