Last night's CMT Music Awards—the country-music television network's version of its sister network MTV's Video Music Awards—veered into "a little more than slightly excruciating" territory when co-host Miley Cyrus tripped her way through a Taylor Swift intro in which she talked about texting the glittery-guitar-hoisting country protege incessantly, an endless setup to what would be one of many "ha ha, Dad, I'm paying
your bills!" zingers that the
Hannah Montana star sent in the direction of her father/svengali, "Achy Breaky Heart" singer Billy Ray Cyrus. (Yes, he performed the line dance that sent him and his mullet to stardom back in 1992, the same year his cash cow was sired.) The opening skit, in which Trace Adkins and his really greasy mop tried currying favor with everyone from Donald Trump to the three remaining Presidential candidates in order to get passes to the show, also mined that route; its final punchline was that Billy Ray was making extra scratch by scalping tickets, which were of course hot properties because of his daughter's presence. That girl is going to be so messed up in three years. Full list of winners—which includes three awards for Kellie Pickler, two for Taylor Swift, and one for that super-creepy video where Jon Bon Jovi and Leann Rimes make out—after the jump.
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Idolator
How is MTV planning to top last year's MTV Video Music Awards, which, despite instilling something resembling post-traumatic stress disorder in the psyches of many a viewer (this writer included), achieved bigger numbers than those in previous years and epitomized the Internet-watercooler-driven strategy that MTV is so aggressively courting these days? ("There was a time when the music video itself is what happened in culture, but now it's the music video and what everyone has to say about it that is what's happening," Brian Graden, president of MTV programming, told Reuters in a piece on the endless remixing and revisiting of MTV's "we do show music" flagship FNMTV.) Will the Los Angeles-based ceremony/party/excuse for televised debauchery go back to the big-numbers well and reinvite Britney Spears, who, most of you will probably remember, sleepwalked through "Gimme More" to open last year's show?
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