Video Music Awards

At most award shows, the tension is typically reserved for the envelope moments — Who will win? Who will lose? — but at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday the drama was bottled up in two questions: What would she wear? What would he say? The "he," of course, was Kanye West, the petulant, tweeting prince of hip-hop culture, and the "she" was Lady Gaga, the plasticized fashion plate of pop who has taken Madonna's costume art one step further with something close to wardrobe architecture.

Winning a Video Music Award may not carry the same cachet as a Grammy, but for 28 years MTV's signature event has proved to be a reliable source of buzz-worthy pop culture moments - a meat dress here, a lesbian kiss there. People don't tune in for the ridiculously uncontested awards celebrating music videos they can't even watch on the network. Viewers want drama and the show usually serves up a heaping portion of tension, whether on stage or in the audience. This is the place where Britney Spears has equally sparkled and crumbled, Courtney Love upstaged Madonna and Kanye West stole Taylor Swift's thunder.

This was the last year that BET staged its annual awards spectacle at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, where it'd been held since 2006, and Sunday's telecast lived up to its "Too big to miss" tagline. The three-hour-plus production saw the highly antcipated return of D'Angelo, over-the-top performances by Kanye West (and his G.O.O.D. Music clan), Nicki Minaj and an emotional tribute to the late Whitney Houston led by her mother, Cissy. Though not a ratings smash -- it drew 7.4 million viewers, down slightly from last year's 7.7 million --  next year's telecast could change that.

"Whatever happened to the days of Madonna and Britney Spears?" That's the question my date to the Video Music Awards asked me at the conclusion of the show with a shrug. It was a semi-nice way of saying this year's ceremony felt pointless (though maybe not for the performers who got solid album plugs). But no one was more shortchanged than the few thousand who filed into the Staples Center on Thursday afternoon hoping for a spectacle-filled show. Here are a few moments that stuck for this writer in his seat.

MTV's Video Music Awards is packing up from Los Angeles and headed to the East Coast. The always irreverant video fete is returning to New York City for the first time since 2009 for the ceremony that turns 30 this year (yes, you are as old as you think you are), the network announced Monday.   Brooklyn's Barclays Center will host the spectacle, which airs live Aug. 25. PHOTOS: Iconic rock guitars and their owners “From a vibrant musical scene for up and coming artists to epic concerts by today's biggest stars and the triumphant return of pro sports to the borough after nearly 60 years, Brooklyn has re-emerged as a cultural capitol where music, sports and entertainment history is made every day,” Stephen Friedman, president of MTV, said in a statement.  MTV teased the new location with a batch of cute photos of the show's Moonman statue traveling from L.A. to New York.

The gall is impressive, to represent what occurred Thursday night at Staples Center, on MTV and via backstage cameras streaming online, as an “awards ceremony.” A virtual partnership between global communications company Viacom (which owns MTV) and the remaining big four major labels, the annual Video Music Awards presented/marketed some of America's hottest pop stars in a music production so bloated that ego very nearly burst out of my flatscreen. And what's worse, little of unscripted interest happened.

A Green Day member sporting a "Free Pussy Riot" T-shirt was about as political as the 2012 MTV VMAs were able to get. The band unveiled yet another new song, "Let Yourself Go," and the song, again, saw the band moving away from the political and social overtunes of "American Idiot" and "21st Century Breakdown. " Green Day, in fact, has been doing everything in its power to state that it should not be considered an important band. As evidence, the band has its own "Angry Birds" characters.

By any measure, the "video" portion of the Video Music Awards is nominal at best. Yes, there are categories for editing, cinematography and art direction (and something called "message"), but every year the VMAs become increasingly untethered to any cinematic output in favor of manufactured spectacle that gets less and less spectacular in time. So, for what it's worth after the foggy haze of One Direction hormones and Rihanna's laser-emitting reptile thrones, here are some thoughts on the major videos as actual videos.

COULD Geoff Boucher have been any more disdainful of the Video Music Awards ["It's About Knight and Green Day," Aug. 30]? The most interesting point about the VMAs this year was the resurgence of rock. Green Day winning the most awards was a big part of that, yet Boucher relegated them to one short paragraph that was followed by a dismissive sentence, "But who remembers who wins?" Their performance and the performances of My Chemical Romance and the Killers were the highlights of the show.