How Do You Win an AVN Award?
The general idea is that companies submit their movies for categories they feel deserving of, reviewers decide pre-noms in their reviews, and those selected vote on the nominees.
Most of the voters work for AVN as an employee or a freelance reviewer. There are a couple voters (like myself), who are just asked to be part of the process, What you do is, you just don’ t pick your #1 choice, what you do is put all the nominees in order of your favorite to least favorite. I like that idea, because sometimes i have a couple movies that I think deserve recognition, and it’s hard to pick one as the BEST over all the rest.
Whatever you feel about how the decision process goes to pick the final winners of the awards, it is A LOT of work for all involved. I watched hours and hours of movies some on fast forward. But I watched them all. And you don’t just vote for your for your number one choice, you put all the nominees in order of your preference from #1 down to #15.
I know all the rumors of advertising dollars buying company’s awards. ( I also know the even worse rumors of bj’s buying awards)
I don’t know for a fact the process that picks whose name goes on that final piece of card stock that is read on stage, because I have never been involved in the behind the scenes.
I will tell you this- I have been a part of the AVN voters for 7 (?) years now. Some years a lot of people I vote for win. Some years few of my picks get the trophies. And I think you would be surprised to learn there are less then 70 people in the voting pool. If someone has a printed program from the show maybe they could comment with the number of voters (whose names are usually listed), or even better type up the list. ( It’s not on line)
Honestly I didn’t vote in some of the foreign, POV, and amateur categories because I don’t watch alot of those.
I voted all the T/S, Anime, BDSM and marketing topics, because those interest me.
And I did vote in anal. internal, all sex, gang-bang, the hardcore stuff which I DO watch, but don’t love.
I also of course voted in the main ones- best actor, feature, newbie etc…
I just checked this year, my picks against the winners and the end result is…
Out of about 100 categories- I voted in approx 70
16 of my # 1 choices won the award
24 of my top 5 choices won the award.
I think that is a pretty fair representation. And no one is paying me anything.
Of course I have my disappointments-
Best Makeup award was no contest to XXX The Munsters, the fact that Pirates won that one goes against all logic.
Best music should have gone to Bewitched or Morphine, if you ask me with a couple other movies as runners up. I didn’t like the winner’s Bad Luck Betties "noise". But that just goes to show that all the various opinions of the voters are important. I like that the variety of the voters tastes and ages are so different.
Looking back on who I voted to win, and who won, it seems like it was quite a fair deal, after all, I’m not exactly a player in the advertiser game, and quite a few of my picks either won, or the winner was one of my top 5..
I guess it is hard to say whether AVN is influenced by their advertisers or not. But I can tell you that a fair amount of people or companies I voted for won, and I don’t have an agenda. So I would surmise that while AVN does have some responsibiliy to their advertisers, the winners of the awards ARE chosen by the voters. I can say that for sure because I am one.
To Don- I didn’t like the Burn cover because before you opened it and realized it was a matchbook, it looked cheap.
I’ll leave the specifics of the voting process to you or Dan Miller to describe but as a newcomer to voting on the awards, I did my best to put in a lot of time/energy to say with a straight face that I kept an open mind with regard to who I voted for and how I interpreted the stated categories.
For example, I disagree about “Munsters” since the make up was not the best of the nominees to fit the bill of “Best use of makeup to enhance a production”. Merely copying the make up of an old TV show wasn’t enough for many voters as there was no creativity involved, nor did it enhance the production (the movie itself fell far short of what a decent comedy/parody should be).
In terms of music, I have to admit that many of the “Alt” titles went above and beyond to provide original music versus the usually generic stock music featured in most titles. Bewitched (like all of Mullen’s parodies) had a classic riff but the idea he relies on is to as closely imitate the original as he can without getting sued, his own talents probably excellent should he try a completely new project (he has years of music industry experience).
I winced at some of the male performer wins and category wins where it was clear the rest of you were impressed by something I just did not see (the packaging of Burn is already falling apart on me so I admit to hating it) but as you said, a lot of varied people voted on many categories (and like you, skipped those we were not suited for).