MTV Turning This Year’s VMA-Nominating Process Into A Block Party For Street Teams

noah | July 21, 2008 12:00 pm
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MTV has announced that it’s opening nominations for this year’s video music awards to the fans, presumably because July and August are low-traffic months for Web sites all over the planet and they need to boost the traffic to MTV.com somehow. Eight categories will have their nominations receive “help” from the clicking hordes: Best Male Video; Best Female Video; Best Hip-Hop Video; Best Pop Video; Best Dancing In A Video (apparently the word “choreography” is too syllable-filled for Generation TXT); Best New Artist; Best Rock Video; and Video Of The Year. Given past online skirmishes between crazed fans, it looks like the final category is going to play host to a bloody, yet well-coiffed, showdown between the Jonas Brothers and Tokio Hotel. But what of the other battles?

Voting for Best Female Video and Best Male Video is open now, and given the image-heavy, clusterfuckish “design” that’s been bestowed upon the nomination pages, I’d say that there will be a lot of self-fulfilling prophecizing going on. By which I mean that the “ballots” are initially organized in such a way that the most-viewed clips (“Lollipop” for the Best Male nominees, “No Air” for female, although isn’t that technically a duet?) are at the top of the first page, and will thus get clicked on more than any others, save any crazy street-teaming. Which I guess makes sense, in a way. (Something that may be worth chewing on: There are seven pages of Best Male nominees to four pages of those for Best Female.)

Obviously, this is but one of many VMA-related items to come on Idolator, if only because I too am grimly “excited” to see how the producers will top last year’s trainwreck of an opening. And I’ve actually cast a ballot for Rufus Wainwright’s version of “Zing! Went The Strings Of My Heart”–because if we’re going to be treated to a live re-creation of “Winemouse,” the least we could do is try to make the run-up to it somewhat fun.

2008 MTV Video Music Awards [vma.mtv.com]