Beyonce top nominee for MTV’s awards
Beyonce on Tuesday led nominations for the MTV Video Music Awards as she basked in acclaim for her filmalbum Lemonade.
The pop diva was in the running for 11 awards at MTV’s annual extravaganza, which will take place on Aug 28 in New York’s Madison Square Garden, a shift from the more usual venue in Los Angeles.
Adele came in second with eight nominations.
All but seven were for the chart-topping English balladeer’s Hello, which with more than 1.6 billion views is the fifth-most-watched video on YouTube.
Hello, filmed by the Canadian director Xavier Dolan, shows Adele on the phone with a younger version of herself and was the first music video created for the high-resolution Imax format.
Hello was in the running for video of the year against Beyonce’s Formation, the most overtly political work of the popdiva’scareerasshealigned herself with the Black Lives Matter protest movement.
Filmed by Melina Matsoukas, Formation at one point shows a row of police officers with their hands in the air and graffiti on a wall that reads, “Stop shooting us.”
The video riled some conservative commentators and law enforcement groups who voiced anger when Beyonce performed the song at the Super Bowl, the most watched television event of the year.
Shot in New Orleans, Formation marked a shift in sound by Beyonce to the southern city’s bounce hiphop scene.
Formation was her first single off her album Lemonade, which she released in April to accompany a film that she made for HBO.