2006 MTV Movie Awards (2006) (TV) More at IMDb Pro »

Apart from seeing the brilliant Matrix skit a few years back, I have not seen much of the MTV Movie Awards and decided to give it a try in 2006. After a silly spoof of MI3 that ran out of steam seconds into it, we are treated to a rather cool "Incredibles" style opening credits sequence that I quite enjoyed. After this however things took a turn for the worse and never recovered. Alba comes out and shows as much charisma and natural character as a block of wood and her opening montage was as stiff as it was unfunny. This is followed by Christian Bale giving an embarrassing speech for "Best Hero" – he went on and on as if he had won an Oscar; he is a better actor than this and it demeaned himself to blow it out of proportion.

From here on in we have lots of bad taste humour – the lowest point of which is the horrid "ranch hand job" routine that personally had me cringing in my seat. This continues throughout the ceremony but bits of it are better and funnier. The couple of musical numbers did nothing for me but have me reaching for the fast forward button, which at least made the whole show shorter if nothing else. The awards are mostly pretty bland and have the usual stupid categories of best fight, best kiss and so on. I suppose these categories at least make the awards stand out as unique and fun, but it still doesn't excuse that the choices are normally safe and dull – Hustle & Flow being the most overlooked film of the night (surprising since it was a MTV production). That said though, I suppose it does suit the average age of the audience but I had to restrain my laughter at the idea of Sin City, 40-Year-Old Virgin and Wedding Crashers being the big pushers for "Best Movie".

The award to Jim Carrey is at least amusing and I appreciated the award to Spike Lee for Do The Right Thing; it brings to audience's attention but I wish that the teenagers had more time for his more recent work – credit to him as well for noting that the issues he raised in the 80's are still just as relevant and evident today. Alba is a sexy host but she either overacts or is wooden; for MTV viewers I suppose it is sufficient that she has a good body. Speaking of which I was surprised by how much sexist humour there was in the presentations – women are presented as sexual objects and many jokes back that up. More uncomfortable was the homophobic humour – they can pat themselves on the back for awarding Brokeback but this doesn't excuse the jokes and so on at its expense.

Overall this is a pretty weak awards ceremony that didn't work for me and even managed to be basic to the point where I suspect the target audience found it rather irritating. Bland hosts, crude and tasteless humour, sexy people, bland awards and average musical numbers. Credit to it for doing some things right and at least trying to be fun, but mainly this fell way short of the mark.