3 hours ago
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February 28, 2026 — 5:30am
I don’t have a lot in common with the great Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek (RIP Catherine O’Hara), but there is one trait I share with her: my favourite season is awards season.
The annual slew of entertainment awards is a highlight on my calendar. Yes, they’re mostly frivolous and ridiculous and increasingly at odds with the reality of the world, but frankly, that’s what makes them all the more welcome as a distraction.
I love being able to wake up in the morning to tune into an awards-ceremony red carpet, judging gowns that are worth more than my mortgage repayments before I’ve even changed out of my Milo-stained, five-seasons-old Anko pyjamas.
Even better are the ceremonies themselves. The thrill of tuning in to live broadcasts with people all around the world and reacting in real time on social media (RIP old Twitter) makes them the kind of life- and community-affirming spectacles that are vital and all too rare. (I suppose people who are into sports get to experience such highs regularly, but they also have to watch sports.)
There’s just one problem with recent awards seasons (well, there’s a lot more than one, but for now, let’s focus on this): there are no unserious movie and TV awards shows any more. As much as I love the Oscars and even the Golden Globes, they’re generally events for people who take themselves very seriously and who are rewarded for doing so. But now, more than ever, we need fun. We need piss-takes. We need rich and beautiful celebrities to be mildly humiliated for our viewing pleasure.
Once upon a time, we had all this and more in the form of the MTV Movie and TV Awards (initially just the MTV Movie Awards, before TV became the new movies). They were the most unserious and fun an awards show could get (not counting the Razzies, which no one ever attended, except Sandra Bullock that one time). The last MTV Movie and TV Awards were held in 2023, and there are currently no signs of their return. Awards season (and also me personally) is much sadder for it.
Forget the snobs of the Academy and their endless wrong choices; the MTV Movie and TV Awards were awards that we – the plebs of the public – could vote for. And they were about important things like, yes, best film and best performance, but also best kiss, best villain, most frightened performance and, for a few heady years in the 2010s, even best shirtless performance. Where else can such niche but significant art forms get celebrated? Other than AO3 and Tumblr gifs, I mean.
It wasn’t just the awards themselves that were great – the ceremony itself was often iconic. This was not the show for long, painfully earnest speeches. It was where Jennifer Lopez could booty-slap Tom Cruise-as-Les-Grossman on stage, where Eminem could deliver his greatest acting performance of all time by feigning disgust as a half-naked Sacha Baron Cohen crash-landed on him, and where, most memorably of all, Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling could recreate their The Notebook kiss while hundreds of celebrities enthusiastically cheered them on (and somehow make it even hotter than the actual movie version).
It was a smorgasbord of spectacle, a celebrity circus, a pop-cultural touchstone. And nothing like it exists any more.
So, in its absence, allow me to give out some awards that really matter for the past year of movies and TV:
- Best music sequence: Sinners
- Best cottage episode: Bridgerton
- Most convincing fake Russian: Connor Storrie
- Best yearner: Jonathan Bailey
- Best snail performance: Wuthering Heights
- Best fruit performance: The peaches in The Summer I Turned Pretty
- Most memorable run: The kids in Weapons and their freaky arms
- Best promo cycle performance: Michelle Yeoh and her “Madame Morrible, MM — flip it around, Wicked Wiiitch!”
- Hottest corpse: Jacob Elordi
Alas, without an actual ceremony that would force Jacob Elordi to wear a green monster costume to accept his prize while also escorting a snail on stage, these awards won’t make it very far.
For now, we’ll have to make do with the Academy Awards, and hope that this year, the briefcases containing the winners’ announcements might get mixed up and create chaos, giving us a good 48 hours of iconic memes and at least a brief respite from The Horrors.
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