By now you’ve surely seen photos from last night’s MTV Movie Awards, so I won’t bother posting all my favorites…mostly because there was nothing that really blew me away.  Instead, this awards show cemented for me the fact that we have relented to the onslaught of trashiness.  The Socialite Who Shall Not Be Named paved the way, and the elevation of people like Tila Tequila (who actually looked pretty on this occasion, egads!) to “star” status shows that the apocalypse is near.  (Or that we’re all just really effing bored.)  Either way, our standards = all-time low.  No group of girls better epitomizes this than the Pussycat Dolls, who were once a cool, neo-feminist, let’s-use-sex-in-an-empowering-way dance troupe.  Somewhere along the way they became a corporate marketing machine, symbolic of the “If you don’t look like a porn-star, you are not sexy” madness that seems to have overtaken Hollywood.

Collagen-enhanced lips?  Triple layers of bronzer?  Spackled on foundation?  Waist-length extensions?  The gang’s all here!  I want to veto this type of “beauty” as the standard, please.  It’s tired, it’s classless and nobody wins.

And in this corner we have people with some true star (not to mention staying) power.  Call me naive, but I think this might actually be Sarah Jessica Parker’s real hair.  Sure, the figure-skating shoes are a little bizarre, but her ensemble is fun and sexy without being tasteless.  The fact that Katie Holmes sported jeans, a Sgt. Pepper’s-style jacket and that messy, cute little-girl hairdo to one of the most raucous red carpet events of the year is awesome.

I was invited to the 2008 MTV Movie Awards Gifting Suite today, so I dropped by around lunch, not really knowing what to expect.  Holy free stuff, Batman!  It was an utter orgy of swag (gee, Jolie, think you should have realized that sooner, seeing as the invite had “gifting suite” in the title and all?) and I felt genuinely mortified as people tried to shove things at me.  All I could think was, “Don’t need that…don’t want that…maybe I should just grab things and give them to charity…do I know anybody who needs free dog food?…ooh, champagne! no, it’s too early in the day…”  In the end, I took a pair of Tag Jeans, plopped an energy drink into my purse, grabbed some t-shirts, underwear and face cream to throw into this weekend’s beauty sale…and surrendered just a little bit of my soul.  (As I left, I spotted Whitney Port from The Hills—my second Whitney sighting in three weeks—looking adorable in a multi-colored sundress.  If I can find a photo of her online, I’ll post later.)