MTV Video Music Awards to return to Los Angeles

[April 24, 2014]  LOS ANGELES (Reuters) — The annual MTV Video Music Awards, one of the music industry's top televised showcases, will return to Los Angeles this summer from New York City, the U.S. cable channel said on Wednesday.

The show, popular among MTV's young viewers prized by advertisers, will take place on August 24, the day before TV's Emmy Awards, at the Forum in Inglewood, California, about eight miles southwest of downtown Los Angeles.

The Video Music Awards, which hand out "Moonman" statuettes of an astronaut planting an MTV flag, can be crucial exposure for singers and bands and is best known for its unscripted and often provocative moments.

At last year's show in Brooklyn, singer Miley Cyrus' sexually explicit "twerk" dance overshadowed the awards ceremony and dominated news headlines the following week.

And just as last year's show helped unveil the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn, this year's show will also help relaunch Madison Square Garden Co's recently renovated Forum, an arena which had been bypassed by major events since the Staples Center opened in downtown Los Angeles in 1998.

The Video Music Awards began in 1984 and helped propel the young cable channel, now owned by Viacom Inc, as a player in the entertainment industry.

A host for this year's show has not yet been announced, and MTV may go without one, similar to last year.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and G. Crosse)

[© 2014 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved.]

Copyright 2014 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.