MTV Video Music Awards: Living For the Moment

The last time MTV's Video Music Awards were in New York, Madonna tongued Britney and dissed Christina.

That was the kind of quintessential VMA Moment that the trophy show sorely needs tonight.

Ratings have dipped. And the past two VMAs weren't particularly memorable. So as the VMAs return to Radio City Music Hall tonight -- the same venue where The Kiss occurred three years ago -- something, anything , is bound to happen.

Maybe Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey, both scheduled to appear, will kiss and make up. (Yeah, right.) Maybe Beyonce will bring out some hot firemen as she belts her new you-done-me-wrong anthem, "Ring the Alarm." (Hmm . . . ) Maybe the four synchronized men of the rock band OK Go, scheduled to perform their YouTube hit "Here It Goes Again," will fall off their treadmills. (Who knows?)

That's the beauty of the VMAs. It's predictably unpredictable, almost to the point of being formulaic. And, for the most part, MTV has stuck to that formula because it has worked out.

"It's our Super Bowl," says Dave Sirulnick, the show's executive producer. And it's a yearly spectacle, now in its 23rd year, that needs spicing up, if the Nielsen ratings are any indication.

As the VMAs went south to Miami the past two years, the show's viewership went south, too -- although MTV easily won the night in the 12-to-34-year-old demographic last year. The fact is, a lesser-viewed VMA is still one of the biggest award shows among those coveted younger viewers. (The show, which nearly 12 million people saw in 2002, had only 8 million viewers last year, but nearly 3.5 million of them were younger than 25.)

And until recently, viewers could count on that VMA Moment. Where else could Diddy, ever the showoff, make a red-carpet entrance by arriving on an 18-wheeler at the 2001 VMAs as he rapped "Bad Boys for Life"? "That entrance was just so over the top, so ridiculous," says Jon Caramanica, music editor at Vibe magazine.

Folks at MTV hype the Video Music Awards for many weeks, and re-air the show to death for a few months. And there's some irony in that.

In a channel that gave birth to the music video a quarter-century ago -- with the Buggles' appropriately titled "Video Killed the Radio Star" -- MTV doesn't play that many music videos anymore. You'd probably have to get up at 6 a.m. to catch many of this year's nominated videos, including Panic! at the Disco's "I Write Sins, Not Tragedies" (up for best group video), T.I.'s "What You Know" (up for best male video) and Kelly Clarkson's "Because of You" (up for best female video).

This year, the show is going "multi-platform" (the buzzword in MTV's New York offices). There are cameras all over Radio City Music Hall, Sirulnick says, and viewers can check out the backstage action on Overdrive, MTV's broadband channel, while getting updates -- did Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie" beat out the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Dani California" for video of the year? -- on their cellphones through MTV Mobile.

Even New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has gotten involved. In a taped spot on MTV's "Total Request Live," Bloomberg, admiring the Latin-Lebanese singer's hips, said he hopes Shakira prevails.

Not that viewers such as Alexandra Olsen and Kristen McCarron, students at Catholic University, tune in to watch who-won-what.

"That show is, like, the ultimate pop-culture extravaganza," says Olsen, 19.

McCarron, also 19, chimes in: "Every celebrity we love, and every celebrity we love to hate, will be there."

Fergie, flying solo these days from the Black-Eyed Peas, will open a pre-show event called "Red Carpet on the Rock" with her chart-topping "London Bridge." Justin Timberlake, Pharrell, and the Killers, among others, are set to perform. And presenters will include Axl Rose, Paris Hilton and Snoop Dogg.

"That's quite a list of people. You put all these narcissists in one room, all of them jockeying to be the person you remember at the VMAs, and it's just craziness," says Matthew Perpetua, who runs the popular music site Fluxblog.org

Perpetua has been watching the VMAs since he was 11 -- he's 27 now -- and he's a VMA historian of sorts. (As he's done in the past four years, he plans to write a minute-by-minute commentary of the VMAs as it airs.) As always, Perpetua says, there promises to be a VMA Moment that will be IM'ed, blogged, YouTubed and dissected.

Remember the VMAS in 1999, when Diana Ross got a little too friendly and reached out for Lil' Kim's hanging bosom?

Or when Michael Jackson, the self-proclaimed "King of Pop," locked lips with his new missus, Lisa Marie Presley in 1994?

The time when Tim Commerford, bassist for Rage Against the Machine, got so angry after losing the 2000 best rock video award to Limp Bizkit that he jumped on stage and climbed the set in protest?

The evening's host is actor-rocker Jack Black, himself a model of unpredictability. In the hit film "School of Rock," Black's character says that rock-and-roll was "killed by a little thing called MTV."

But maybe this year, it will be a wild, rock-and-roll moment that can boost MTV.

The MTV Video Music Awards ceremony (three hours) airs tonight at 8 on MTV.