Both Men And Woman Can Be Heroes At The MTV Movie Awards

Is MTV making an important statement with one of their MTV Movie Award categories? I don’t find myself watching much MTV these days (I long for actual music videos), so this particular story was only in my peripheral. But since I follow the official Hunger Games Twitter account I knew Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss was up for “Best Hero” at this year’s MTV Movie Awards. Yes, Best Hero, not Best Female Hero, not Best Heroine. Interesting. 

A little backstory first. Though the Movie Awards have been around since 1996, MTV introduced the “Best Hero” category in 2006, and haven’t awarded it again since. Which is surprising considering all the superhero films in the last few years. Regardless, that year, the nominees were:

• Christian Bale – Batman Begins
• Jessica Alba – Fantastic Four
• Kate Beckinsale – Underworld: Evolution
• Ewan McGregor – Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith
• Daniel Radcliffe – Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Bale/Batman walked away with the award that year but there were two women nominated. This time around, “Best Hero” is a live social voting category. This is something they’re trying with a few of their categories in order to engage fans. The nominees this year are:

• Daniel Radcliffe  – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 2
• Jennifer Lawrence – The Hunger Games
• Chris Evans – Captain America
• Chris Hemsworth – Thor
• Channing Tatum – 21 Jump Street

Again, they are nominated by character, not actor but I’m sure fans will take the performance into consideration. But again, they decided to include a female character. Could MTV be trying to make some sort of statement by having both men and women in the category? Odds are, no. It may just simply be that they don’t have enough entries to warrant creating a separate category. The Oscars still have only one category for their Best Director award, yet have Best Male and Female Actor categories. Yes, there are many women directors out there but maybe not enough doing Oscar caliber work. My immediate thought in this hero category was, why wasn’t Gina Carano’s role in Haywire not included? Yeah, it was sort of a revenge story but she was the good guy. Can you think of other female heroes from the past year?

Granted, in the scheme of award ceremonies, the MTV Movie Awards don’t rank all that high but it’s nice to see that a female character that made such a huge splash this year is in the running along with the fellas. Right now, Katniss is in second place after Harry Potter. The way to vote on Twitter is by using the following hashtags: #votepotter, #votekatniss, #votethor, #votecaptain, and #votejenko. Kind of makes you wonder what would have happened in The Hunger Games if Capitol residents were allowed to vote.

You can keep track of the live voting process here, which continues through the show, this Sunday on MTV.

(via International House of Geek)

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Jill Pantozzi

Jill Pantozzi is a pop-culture journalist and host who writes about all things nerdy and beyond! She’s Editor in Chief of the geek girl culture site The Mary Sue (Abrams Media Network), and hosts her own blog “Has Boobs, Reads Comics” (TheNerdyBird.com). She co-hosts the Crazy Sexy Geeks podcast along with superhero historian Alan Kistler, contributed to a book of essays titled “Chicks Read Comics,” (Mad Norwegian Press) and had her first comic book story in the IDW anthology, “Womanthology.” In 2012, she was featured on National Geographic’s "Comic Store Heroes," a documentary on the lives of comic book fans and the following year she was one of many Batman fans profiled in the documentary, "Legends of the Knight."

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