It turns out that predicting the winners of the VMA’s is even more of a fool’s errand than it is for most awards shows, which I have realized after correctly predicting a grand total of 2 (out of 14) categories (Foo Fighters for Rock Video, GaGa for Video with a Message).  Here a few things I learned about the VMA’s this year:

–MTV does not care about consistency.
The distribution of the awards reminded me of an episode of Da Ali G Show.  Brüno was interviewing some guy at a fashion show.  He asked him why the show was humorless, and then he asked him how it had maintained a sense of humor; he asked him why the show was about the individual, and then he asked him why it was about other people; he asked him how he had made the show so heavy, and then he asked him how he had made it so light.  Ultimately he asked this guy if he cared about inconsistency, which of course, he didn’t.  Clearly, MTV feels the same way.  “Firework” won Video of the Year, even though it did not also win Best Female Video, and it wasn’t even nominated in Best Pop Video.  (Another Katy Perry video – “Last Friday Night” – was nominated in the Pop category.  There seemed to have been a desire to recognize all of Katy’s videos from the past year, which is fine, but she could have had multiple nominations in the same category if the nominators wanted her to.)  This isn’t anything new.  Panic! at the Disco won Video of the Year – and nothing else – in 2006, while Beyoncé won Video of the Year in 2009 but, quite famously, did not also win Female Video.
–This was Adele’s year, but it was also Katy Perry’s, and GaGa (and Britney) need to be recognized, too.
“Rolling in the Deep” is the biggest hit of the year, and it won more moonmen than any other video this year, but those wins all came in the “professional categories” (Art Direction, Editing, Cinematography).  Meanwhile, Katy Perry has had a year comparable to – perhaps better than – Adele’s, having just had her fifth number one single off the same album (an accomplishment previously achieved only by Michael Jackson).  Her videos also had three wins (two for “E.T.,” one for “Firework”).  Meanwhile, Lady GaGa was somehow able to top them both in Female Video, and Britney was able to top them as well in Pop Video.
–Justin Bieber wins everything he is nominated for.
Unless it’s the Grammys.  And nobody understands the Grammys.