The MTV Movie Awards have always been wild, but I found myself in one of two places last night and I can’t figure out which. Either I’m everything I never wanted to become in terms of being like my parents and not understanding the younger generation and the progress of media. Or, I still have my wits about me and the MTV Movie Awards are over the top and an affront to what’s left of our faith-based nation.
Without question, the highlights of the evening were movie trailers, but that should tell us something. The highlights weren’t music–as, say, the Musical Hall of Fame shows. The event should probably just be called the MTV awards, because the emphasis is on promoting the MTV culture as if it is normative, and it is not. There is certainly not much that was redemptive in the show. Consider:

Bleeped words and music ran throughout the evening. Even the commercials featured bleeped out words and music.
Sasha Baren Cohen, who made “Borat” and whose “Bruno” is coming out soon, set off the censors with not an array of bleeps but just one long hit on the silencer button, for his lewd, gross and uninvited entrance and landing on Eminem. I think it was a miracle he didn’t get beat up by the bodyguards!
Some guy who won a Sound Editing award was inexplicably featured in a scene that would have been inappropriate for any PG movie and the words were not bleeped out.
The songs about “jizz,” pants, etc. were prevalent and made for cable-TV.
Even mentioning some of the other hijinks is impossible due to our inability to find printable words within the Beliefnet guidelines!

I saw perhaps the best headline for it in a post titled “Usual Gang of Idiots, Shenanigans At MTV Movie Awards.”
My two daughters watched the show with a few winces but for the most part this passes for cultural leadership. They were thrilled to see the trailers from the next “Twilight” and “Harry Potter” installments. But those few minutes weren’t worth the full show. At least not for this dad.