There is a particular kind of exhaustion that settles over an awards ceremony when it spends its opening twenty minutes trying to convince you it is still relevant. The VMAs have suffered from this condition for the better part of a decade – fumbling through forced viral moments, trotting out legacy hosts, and engineering “controversies” that evaporate before the post-show drinks are poured. After a Grammy season that celebrated resilience and revolution, the music industry arrived at the VMAs carrying a different energy entirely – one less interested in spectacle than in substance. But something shifted on the evening of 7 September 2025, at UBS Arena in Elmont, New York. The 2025 MTV Video Music Awards did not attempt to be the centre of pop culture. They simply were.
Hosted by LL Cool J and broadcast across CBS and MTV, the ceremony unfolded with a strange, almost deliberate calm. No manufactured feuds. No baffling tribute montages to moments nobody mourned. Instead, the night belonged to three women who have, in their own varying ways, redrawn the map of mainstream pop – and to one whose existence upon it has long been taken for granted. Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga, and Sabrina Carpenter collected the major trophies between them, each winning three or more Moon Person awards. Mariah Carey, introduced by Grande with visible reverence, finally received the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award – her first-ever VMA win, an oversight so staggering it bordered on satire.
If this reads as a retread of the usual “women run the night” narrative, it is worth pausing to consider how rare the substance behind the headline has become. This was not a concession to demographics. It was an accumulation of power, earned across albums, tours, and creative gambles that might have cratered lesser careers.
Grande’s Return as Confession
Ariana Grande had not appeared at the VMAs since 2020. The intervening five years had been a gauntlet – a tabloid divorce, a high-profile relationship, the emotional toll of portraying Glinda in the Wicked film adaptations, and the slow, private work of what she now calls healing. When she arrived on stage to accept Video of the Year for Brighter Days Ahead, she carried not a trophy so much as a thesis.
The video itself – a sprawling, 26-minute short film rather than a conventional pop clip – is a meditation on trauma, memory, and the possibility of recovering the self that existed before damage was done. Grande’s father appeared in the film, a detail she acknowledged with uncharacteristic openness. Her speech was specific, almost disarming in its directness: she thanked her therapist, her fans, and her family, framing the project as evidence of ongoing work rather than a finished product. “If you’re on that journey, please continue onward,” she said, her voice catching. “Because I promise there are brighter days ahead.”
The night awarded Grande three times – Video of the Year, Best Pop Video, and Best Long Form Video – a sweep that confirmed Brighter Days Ahead as not merely a commercial success but a critical one. That it also provided the evening’s most emotionally coherent moment was a quiet rebuke to the prevailing assumption that pop vulnerability is a brand strategy rather than a creative act.
Gaga’s Efficiency as Art Form
Lady Gaga entered the ceremony as its most nominated artist, with 12 nods. She departed it – quite literally – after accepting her first award.
Gaga won Artist of the Year early in the broadcast, a category that pitted her against Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Bad Bunny, Kendrick Lamar, and The Weeknd, none of whom attended. Her speech was brief and characteristically ornate: “Being an artist is a responsibility to make the audience smile, dance, cry, release at any turn,” she reflected, before handing the trophy to her partner, Michael Polansky. Then she left.
The cameras followed her across the city to Madison Square Garden, where her Mayhem Ball Tour was mid-performance. The arena watched as she reappeared live on stage, delivering a gothic-tinged rendition of “Abracadabra” and “The Dead Dance” – a logistical flourish that felt entirely native to Gaga’s particular strain of spectacle, and a vindication of the musical revolution her latest album promised. She collected four awards in total, including Best Collaboration for “Die With a Smile” with Bruno Mars, and two technical prizes for “Abracadabra.” Her VMA career total now stands at 22.
The speed of her departure might have read as discourtesy in another context. Here, it functioned as a statement of priorities. Gaga did not linger for the camera angles or the after-party. She had a job to do elsewhere. The message, implicit and characteristically unsubtle, was that the art is not the award – the art is the show.
Carpenter’s Defiance in Motion
Sabrina Carpenter’s evening carried a different charge. Where Grande was introspective and Gaga was efficient, Carpenter was combative.
She won Best Album for Short n’ Sweet and was named the inaugural Best Pop Artist, a new category that felt less like an innovation and more like an overdue acknowledgement of her commercial dominance. She also took home Best Visual Effects for “Manchild.” Her acceptance speeches were characteristically sharp, at one point thanking the critics who, she said, had driven her to work harder rather than quieter.
The performance, however, was the night’s most pointed statement. Carpenter staged the live debut of “Tears” – from her latest album, Man’s Best Friend – with a cast of drag queens and transgender dancers, including Lexi Love, Simone, and Honey Balenciaga. Emerging from beneath a manhole cover onto a streetscape that doubled as a ballroom, the performers carried signs reading “Protect Trans Rights,” “In Trans We Trust,” and “If You Hate You’ll Never Get Laid.” The choreography was lavish, the politics unmistakable.
In an era when corporate pride campaigns are routinely dissected for sincerity, Carpenter’s gesture landed with a specificity that made it difficult to dismiss. The dancers were not props. They were named, credited, and given choreography that showcased rather than concealed them. It was a performance that understood the difference between solidarity and decoration.
Mariah’s Question to the Room
The emotional centre of gravity, however, belonged to Mariah Carey.
Introduced by Grande – herself a vocal descendant of Carey’s melismatic tradition – Carey received the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award, a lifetime achievement honour that, astonishingly, marked her first VMA victory in the ceremony’s 42-year history. The absurdity of this was not lost on Carey. Taking the stage in a shimmering catsuit, she paused, surveyed the room, and delivered the evening’s sharpest line: “I just have one question. What in the Sam Hill were you waiting for?”
The crowd laughed. Carey did not entirely join them.
She then delivered a medley that functioned as a condensed history of early-2000s pop – “Honey,” “Heartbreaker,” “Obsessed,” and “We Belong Together” – performed with a precision that reminded the audience why these songs remain inescapable. The vocal was controlled, occasionally playful, and entirely unassailable. It was not a comeback. Carey has never gone away. It was, rather, a correction – a formal acknowledgement of a catalogue that has shaped the grammar of contemporary pop singing.
The choice to award Carey at this particular ceremony felt intentional. The VMAs have long struggled with the tension between celebrating the present and respecting the archive. Carey’s win resolved it, if only for an evening, by insisting that the two are not separate endeavours.
Ozzy’s Ghost in the Machine
The tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, who died in July 2025 at the age of 76, arrived as a tonal counterweight to the evening’s prevailing pop polish. Introduced by his son Jack, the segment opened with Yungblud tearing through “Crazy Train” with a manic fidelity that captured the song’s deranged energy without descending into parody.
Then came Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith, performing “Mama, I’m Coming Home” – a song written by Ozzy for his wife Sharon, and one that carried a particular weight given the circumstances. Tyler, whose own vocal struggles have been public, sang with a hoarse, unguarded warmth that made the performance feel less like a tribute than a conversation. Perry’s guitar, spare and melodic, provided the frame. It was the most emotionally exposed moment of the evening, and the most welcome.
The Osbourne tribute served a broader function as well. It reminded the audience that the VMAs, for all their pop centrality, were founded in an era when MTV still played rock videos – when Ozzy, Madonna, and Michael Jackson occupied the same rotating playlist. The distance between then and now is vast, but the thread, however attenuated, remains.
The Quiet Reckoning
Other awards dotted the evening. Rosé and Bruno Mars collected Song of the Year for “APT.” Alex Warren won Best New Artist. Tate McRae took home Best Visual Effects for “Just Keep Watching.” None of these were surprises, and none particularly lingered.
What will endure is the sense that the 2025 VMAs marked a moment of consolidation rather than disruption. The women who won did so not as upstarts but as the established order – Grande with the quiet authority of someone who has survived public scrutiny and returned with work that demands to be taken seriously, Gaga with the unshakeable confidence of an artist who has never needed an award to validate her choices, and Carpenter with the fierce self-possession of someone who understands that visibility is a currency that must be spent deliberately.
The ceremony’s most radical gesture may have been its refusal to manufacture crisis. In a media landscape that treats awards shows as content farms for outrage, the 2025 VMAs offered something closer to a genuine evening of recognition – flawed, occasionally lopsided, but sincere in its conviction that these artists had earned their place. Pop culture does not often permit itself this kind of earnestness. That it did so here, however briefly, was its own form of progress.
