Gore the bore highlight of MTV awards

WHEN a wooden politician delivers the best line of the MTV Music Video Awards, you know the thrill is gone.

So was the decadence, outrageousness and spontaneity that used to make the video music awards such a guilty pleasure.

James Blunt and Gnarls Barkley each took home two awards. Pink’s parody of bubble-headed pop tarts, ‘Stupid Girls’ won for best pop video, Beyonce took home the best R&B video trophy for her booty-shaking ‘Check On It’ and Fall Out Boy won the viewer’s choice award for ‘Dance, Dance’. Best Female Video went to Kelly Clarkson for ‘Because of You’.

But nobody except a video choreographer’s mother watches this show for the awards.

Fans watch for the risque skits, nearly naked starlets, foul-mouthed speeches and those embarrassingly bad dance numbers.

They do not watch for lectures from former Vice President. Al Gore on global warming. When does the phrase, “here’s a photo of a glacier melting” ever fit into an awards show?

Gore did get a laugh, however, when he intoned, “I actually was not intending to be here tonight, but then MTV explained that Justin Timberlake was bringing sexy back”.

Somewhere along the way, the MTV Awards seemed to have morphed into the Grammys.

The only unscripted moment of mayhem came when some unidentified person crashed the acceptance speech of Panic! At the Disco, who won video of the year for ‘I Write Sins Not Tragedies’. Before any group member got to say a word, the crasher took the mic, giving shout outs to rapper Remy Ma and saying, “MTV never gave me my own show!” before making way for the winners. But that still fell short of MTV’s once trademark water-cooler moments, like Eminem punching out a puppet.

Beyonce got some points for at least trying to deliver a show-stopper.

Singing her call-to-arms, the anti-cheating single ‘Ring the Alarm’, she appeared wearing a sexy trench coat and a searing gaze.

While her voice was in perfect form, the performance was disjointed, and the out-of-place dance number in the middle seemed to steal the choreography from Janet Jackson’s ‘Rhythm Nation’ almost 20 years earlier.

At one point, the crew from the MTV gross-out show Jackass gave one of its members an electric shock.

If only they could have delivered a similar jolt to the whole show.