Last night’s annual MTV Movie Awards was an evening of bad humor, capitalism bashing and Obama campaign fundraising.
The show began with a lackluster comedy monologue by British comedian, Russell Brand. In his performance, Brand attempted to mock Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian and Charlie Sheen, to name a few.
Riffing off of Justin Bieber’s recent physical altercation with a paparazzo, Brand quipped that even if Bieber went to jail and was subjected to repeated beatings, he might still be happy that he “got away from them bloody screaming girls!”
Brand also joked about his divorce from Katy Perry, mentioning how Kim Kardashian took a lot of pressure off of him with her “world record quick marriage.”
As his monologue dragged on, Brand resorted to shouting out “Hunger Games” and “Twilight” whenever a joke failed, in order to elicit mass applause and screams of approval from the teenage girls in the audience.
Noting that Charlie Sheen was in attendance, Brand declared that he appeared “relatively sober” and asked him to distract the audience in case he started doing something that would endanger his green card.
Brand also seized the chance to pay tribute to Occupy protestors, taking shots at democracy and capitalism.
In his repulsive tirade, Brand screamed, “Obviously I don’t vote because I believe democracy is a pointless spectacle where we choose between two indistinguishable political parties, neither of whom represent the people but the interests of the powerful business elites who run the world.”
MTV doesn’t seem to share the disgust with the two-party system voiced by the guy they hired to host their awards show. After all, it wouldn’t be an MTV special without explicit fundraising appeals for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. This evening was no exception, with Sarah Jessica Parker butting in repeatedly during commercial breaks to urge viewers to donate to the campaign.
With a little too much excitement Parker proclaimed, “Okay, the guy who ended the war in Iraq, the guy who says you should be able to marry anyone you want, and the guy who created 4 million new jobs, that guy: President Obama and Michelle are coming to my house for dinner on June 14, and I want you to be there too. But you have to go to JoinObama.com for your chance to win and the contest ends tomorrow night so go right here, right now. Because we need him and he needs us.”
Of course, in order to have a chance at joining Parker and the Obama’s for dinner, a minimum donation to the Obama re-election campaign is required.
The fact that Obama’s reelection campaign needed to buy time to reach MTV Movie Awards directly is more evidence that the president must be worried that his young voter base from 2008 has lost a lot of “hope” for more “change” from this administration.
