Start organizing your office pool and preparing your picks. This week, porn stars and the fans who love them gather in Las Vegas for the AVN Awards – the porn ‘Oscars’. Along with the expected calories of best film, best actress and best actor (no one cares much about this one), you find loads of titilating categories – best anal, best girl-girl, best new starlet, and – my personal favourite catch-all – most outrageous sex scene.
For those uninitiated, the AVN Awards are a sweet mix of glamour, trashiness, hilarity and drunken debauchery. Above all, they are not to be missed.
Consider first, the monumental task of giving awards to the porn industry. There is a new porn video produced in the US every 39 minutes – that is almost 15,000 movies a year. PornHub receives almost 2 million visitors every hour. Sifting through this mountain of erotica is a monumental task; sifting through and sorting the good from the bad and then honing in on the truly award-worthy… I can’t even imagine. But, God love ’em, they manage to give out awards in almost 100 categories. And in a feat of editing genius (that Oscar organizers would be well advised to consider), they edit it down to a slick 90 minute broadcast that Showtimes picks up every year.
And the entertainment value. Unparalleled. The ‘what are they wearing’-value eclipses Oscar night by a San Fernando Valley mile. The dresses are a equal parts gorgeous, outrageous, provocative to downright slutty… what’s not to love. The variety of dresses is matched only by the spectrum of acceptance speeches. From heartfelt to hilarious; from poetic to, you-guesses-it, slutty. Again… the Oscars could learn from the level of cantor and sincerity that walks across that Las Vegas red carpet.
I’m not a huge porn fan but I will say this. For pure entertainment value you can’t beat the AVN’s. I haven’t watched there Oscar Awards for years… but I never miss the AVNs.
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