Second Annual YouTube Awards: Complete List of Winners, Categories, and Videos
From Chris Crocker’s “Leave Britney Alone!!!” to Obama Girl’s “I Got a Crush on Obama,” the competition was fierce for this year’s twelve category YouTube Awards, which I believe could be the most entertaining award “show” of the year.
Here are this year’s deserving winners by category
Adorable: Laughing Baby
Comedy: Potter Puppet Pals in “The Mysterious Ticking Noise”
Commentary: LonelyGirl15 is Dead
Creative: The Original Human Tetris
Eyewitness: Battle at Kruger (AKA The Water Buffalo vs. The Lions & Crocodile)
Inspirational: Blind Painter
Instructional: How to Solve a Rubik’s Cube (Part One)
Music:
Chocolate Rain Original Song by Tay Zonday
Politics: Stop the Clash of Civilizations
Series: The Guild – Episode 1: Wake Up Call
Short Film: My Name is Lisa
Sports: Balloon Bowl
In YouTube fashion, the winners were determined via vote and all of the winners are the “people’s champion.” Personally, I had seen four of these winners over the course of the past year, which makes me feel like I’m still kind of cool, but they were all really fun to check out.
Of this list, my personal favorites are: Potter Puppet Pals (I don’t even watch/read Harry Potter and found this hilarious), Battle at Kruger (a little long, but a little amazing to see a real life version of The Lion King), How to Solve a Rubik’s Cube, and Balloon Bowl (posted above).
What I loved about this list is that while more and more professional and semi-professional film makers are using YouTube to display their content, a large number of the winners were still people just using their own equipment, whether that’s a digital camera or a digital video camera, to put together a video that they thought was fun.
To put it bluntly and obviously, there’s still a lot of value in user-generated content, even as professional content continues to try and take back a lot of this Internet video space.
Unlike the formulas for Hollywood, there are no big name stars or overdone special effects, just unique ideas from an unlimited population of creativity that comes together to create good viral videos that people will care to watch.
And that’s awesome.
Some of the more popular notable nominees that people of “my” generation are familiar with: Chris Crocker’s “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!”, Vote Different (The Apple/Obama Commercial), Obama Girl’s “I Got a Crush on Obama”, the very beautiful YouTube celebrity Mia Rose’s “Mia’s Own Song”, and of course, one of the most shocking videos of all that makes me loathe the police even more, University of Florida student Tasered at Kerry Forum (AKA: “Don’t Tase Me, Bro!”). If it was the LAPD, the student would probably be dead, but that’s another story for another day.
In terms of the Eyewitness category, it’s tough to beat that Water Buffalo video, but “Don’t Tase Me, Bro” has become part of the American vernacular and it seems like it would have been deserving of recognition.
In Politics, Obama Girl’s video was probably one of the most entertaining of the year, while Vote Different
likely generated the most buzz among political blogs, but the winner showed that a viral video doesn’t necessarily have to be funny to be successful.
Overall, it’s a great list. As someone who doesn’t religiously follow award shows (other than attending them, like I did with the Grammys), though I enjoy them, it’s probably one of the most entertaining lists of nominees and winners that you’ll ever see.
Best part? Unlike the Oscars, you can literally see all of the nominees and winners in under two hours.
If you are a pop culture fiend like me, that’s a worthwhile two hours.
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The Potter Puppets for best comedy? Agree to disagree on that one.
obama girl, the political force