While award shows in 2020 remain as weird a prospect as, well, everything else in this grab-bag crapsack of a year, Billboard did manage to get its annual Billboard Music Awards up and running tonight, a scant 6 months after it was originally scheduled back in April. (Which means they were acknowledging music released back in 2019, but hey, just go with it.) And while the ceremony—whose nominees, unlike the Grammys, are based on metrics like sales and streaming numbers, rather than a voting jury—handed out plenty of awards tonight, to everybody from Billie Eilish to BTS, it ultimately declared what we must all have suspected, deep in our weary bones: It’s Post Malone’s world now. We just live in it.
The frequently facially tattooed Postmates fan won Top Artist tonight, for his 2019 album Hollywood’s Bleeding. In doing so, he beat out Top Female Artist Billie Eilish—whose When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? also won Top Billboard 200 Album—for the highest honor of the ceremony, and doomed all of us to a full year of Post Malone, mid-apocalypse rule.
Kelly Clarkson hosted the socially distanced event, “handing out” awards to Lizzo, Harry Styles, Khalid, Luke Combs, Bad Bunny, Lauren Naigle, and Lil Nas X, because folks, “Old Town Road” was only just last year. The ceremony also included pre-taped performances, including one from John Legend, which he dedicated to his wife, Chrissy Teigen with, presumably, the smiling permission of our new musical overlord, Post Malone.
[via CNN]