Talking of awards, this week is turning out to be a busy one for awards news. First up it was the first ever UK Music Video Awards in London last night, with Bjork, always one to innovate when it comes to the pop promo, leading the way with three prizes for the seven minute video to her song 'Wanderlust', which got Best Art Direction, Best Indie Video and the overall Video Of The Year prize.
Other winners on the night included Justice, Kate Nash, Hot Chip, Utah Saints and The Horrors, while Leona Lewis took the public-voted People's Choice prize. Behind the scenes, Best Commissioner went to Atlantic's Tim Nash who has commissioned vids for the likes of Wiley, James Blunt, Primal Scream and Santogold, Best New Director went to James Copeman of Black Dog for his work for Mystery Jets, Noah And The Whale, and
Laura Marling, while Nima Nourizadeh from Partizan, who has worked with the likes of Santogold, Hot Chip and Flight Of The Conchords, was named Best Director.
And finally, that James Lavelle fella presented the first ever MVA Icon Award to Jonathan Glazer, a director renowned for helping to transform the "artistry" of British music videos in the 90s with his videos for the likes of Radiohead, Jamiroquai, Massive Attack and Lavelle's own UNKLE project.
Commenting on the first MVAs, the award's Editorial Director David Knight told CMU: "We've celebrated some great work and great achievements in British music video tonight - by MVA award winners and nominees, and a directing legend in Jonathan Glazer. The first UK Music Video Awards has shown that the tradition of creativity, art and craft in British music videos keeps producing remarkable talent and remarkable work, even in very testing times. And as the new Digital Music Survey on the UK music industry points out, music videos are more influential and important for the music business than ever, because they connect with their audience. People love videos".
In other awards news, the nominations for this year's UK Festival Awards are out. This year's Virtual Festival's organised awards bash will take place at Indigo2 down there at the Dome on 30 Oct. Voting is open until 20 Oct, and fans are encouraged to vote now, now, now at www.festivalawards.com.
Commenting on this year's awards, Virtual Festivals top man Steve Jenner told CMU: "Given that it's been the most talked-about year for festivals ever, it hasn't surprised us that this year has seen by far the most frenetic, intense and furious voting activity in the UK Festival Awards' history. It's been a nail-biting and gripping journey to the final shortlist with the running orders changing hourly in many categories.. Whilst many of the results have been as one would expect, it looks like there could well be one or two very big surprises in the final votes, too. October 30th will definitely be a big night".
And finally from the awards file, this time from the tab marked 'US Music Awards', the nominations for the 2008 American Music Awards are out. This is America's big public voted awards bash, voted for by music fans online, and 23 Nov, when the awards take place in LA, could be Alicia Keys' night as she is shortlisted in no less than five categories.
The winners of the MVAs, and the nominations for the Festival Awards and AMAs, are all given at the bottom of today's CMU Daily, and I've just spent three hours formatting them so I think you should all go and check them out.