Overview

2019 Video Music Awards or 2019 VMAs is the 36th annual award ceremony broadcasted live on television to honor a selection of notable music videos released by various recording artists in 2019. The 2019 VMAs was hosted by Sebastian Maniscalco and featured various performances and A-list presenters.

Background

On July 23rd, 2019, Billboard^[4] announced that Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift were leading nominees with 10 nominations each. On August 26th, The VMAs were hosted at the Prudential Center in Newark.

Notable Developments

On August 26th, 2019, the Video Music Awards featured various A-List celebrity presenters including John Travolta, Billy Ray Cyrus, Lenny Kravitz, Rick Ross, Salt-N-Pepa and Ice-T.^[5] John Travolta made a slight mistake when presenting as he thought Jade Jolie was Taylor swift as pointed out by Twitter user @CarlosBrandt in a post (shown below). Various media outlets like Buzzfeed^[2] and Vogue^[3] created lists of memorable memes, photos and video clips from the event.

Performances

on August 26th, 2019, MTV uploaded numerous musical performances from the 2019 Video Music Awards. Missy Elliott's performance rose to number two on trending the next day and gathered over 1.6 million views in a day (shown below).

MTV also uploaded Shawn Mendes & Camila Cabello performance of "Señorita" (shown below, left) and Lizzo's performance of "Truth Hurst and "Good a Hell" (shown below, right). The video gained over 2.5 million and 883,000 views respectively in a day. Lizzo's performance stirred up conversation on Twitter due to the large butt on stage.

Myley Cyrus' performance of "Slide Away" garnered over one million views on YouTube in a day (shown below, left) and Lil Nas X performed Panini which accumulated over 356,700 views in a day (shown below, right).

Winners

Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, and Billie Eilish came home with three awards each making them the most awarded while Missy Elliott became the first female rapper to win Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award. Ariana Grande won Artist of the Year, Billie Eilish was named Best New Artist, Lil Nas X's Old Town Road
became Song of the Year and Taylor Swift's You Need to Calm Down was awarded Video of the Year.^[1]

Lil Nas X Scroll

Lil Nas X Scroll refers to a moment at the 2019 MTV Video Music Awards during Lil Nas X's acceptance of the "Song of the Year" award for his single Old Town Road featuring Billy Ray Cyrus. During his acceptance of the award on stage, Lil Nas X said, " I got a little speech" and unraveled a long scroll insinuating that his speech would be very long but he promptly handed the microphone over to his collaborator Billy Ray Cyrus. The moment quickly became a caption-able GIF on Twitter. The MTV Twitter account shared a video of Lil Nas X accepting his award for "Song of the Year" (shown below). The video gained over 28,400 likes and 4,200 retweets in a day.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References