Entertainment | Mr. Pink's Blog

AVN 2013: The Big Winners Pt. 2: The Women

Not surprisingly, most eyes were firmly trained on the female nominees and guests of the 2013 AVN Awards – and for good reason. 2012 saw an industry-wide rise in quality and production, and a renewed mainstream interest in celebrating the women of adult entertainment. The winners of this year’s trophies exemplified porn’s versatility and commitment.

Everyone’s favorite bubbly blonde, Lexi Belle, took home trophies for Best Oral Sex Scene, Best Tease Performance (with Remy LaCroix), and Best Three-Way Sex Scene – Boy/Boy/Girl (with Mick Blue and Roman Nomar), while 2012 Female Performer of the Year, Brooklyn Lee, nabbed herself the other Three-Way trophy, sharing that particular spotlight with Asa Akira and James Deen. Lee also snagged Most Outrageous Sex Scene for her “Clothespin-Head” with Rocco Siffredi in John Stagliano’s Voracious: The First Season, Best Anal Sex Scene (with Manuel Ferrara), and Best Foreign Non-Feature for Brooklyn Lee: Nymphomaniac.

This year’s Female Performer of the Year award went to one of porn’s most consistently outrageous, courageous, and popular women: Asa Akira. She also took home awards for Best Double-Penetration Scene, Best Group Sex Scene (both for Asa Akira is Insatiable 3), Best POV Sex Scene (with Jules Jordan) for Asa Akira to the Limit, which also nabbed the very first Best Star Showcase award.

Best New Starlet Remy LaCroix, MILF/Cougar Performer of the Year Julia Ann, Best Actress Lily Carter, and Female Foreign Performer of the Year Aleksa Diamond were all awarded for their excellent breakthrough work this year, too, but one female-classified accolade arguably drew more attention than even them, that of Transsexual Performer of the Year. The award went to Vaniity, who now also holds the honor of being the first transsexual performer awarded onstage at an AVN Awards ceremony.

Look for more post-ceremony coverage right here at Mr. Pink’s as I cover everything from “ethnic” and “sex tape” releases to curios like Best Educational Release, as well as other notable winners throughout the next week. If the 2013 AVN Awards confirmed anything, it’s that the adult entertainment industry is not only alive and well here in the USA, but that it’s absolutely thriving!

AVN 2013: The Big Winners Pt. 1: The Men

Now that the porn industry’s annual celebration of all things carnal has come to an end, it’s time to congratulate those who sucked, fucked, shot, or produced their way into the winner’s circle of the 2013 AVN awards, “the Oscars of porn”, and the one event every year that combines porn, comedy, music, and red carpet garment-ogling in one pretty package.

Notable men winning awards this year weren’t just those who show the world their penis on a near-daily basis. Arguably the biggest male winner was Graham Travis, director of 2012 AVN winner Portrait of a Call Girl. This year, Travis’ Elegant Angel feature Wasteland took home awards for Best Cinematography (Alex Ladd, Carlos D., Mason), Best Drama, and Movie of the Year, as well as Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Director for Travis himself.

Axel Braun’s Star Wars XXX: A Porn Parody nabbed awards for Best Art Direction, Best Parody – Comedy, Best Screenplay – Parody (Braun and Mark Logan), Best Selling/Renting Title of the Year, Best Supporting Actor (Tom Byron), Best Overall Marketing Campaign – Individual Project, Best Director – Parody for Braun (his first award in that particular category), and Best Director – Body of Work for Braun, his second in as many years.

Performers awarded trophies this year include Mark Ashley for Unsung Male Performer of the Year, Rocco Siffredi for Male Foreign Performer of the Year, Logan Pierce for Best Male Newcomer, and Steven St. Croix for Best Actor. The greater glory, that of the Male Performer of the Year went to James Deen, who in a gracious speech thanked “every director who hires [him]… any girl that will have sex with [him].” Deen also won for Crossover Star of the Year in a tie with Sunny Leone, and with one of the reasons for that accolade (Paul Schrader’s film The Canyons) inching closer to release, Deen’s star is only on the rise.

Lupe Fuentes and The Ex-Girlfriends

If you’re a reasonably attractive young woman that fucks on camera for a living, your career possibilities aren’t as limited as you might think. Amia Miley stopped shooting porn, attached herself to a second-tier Jersey Shore pseudo-celebrity, and relaunched herself as a sexually suggestive yet SFW YouTube personality. (See her dusting the contents of a refrigerator in her underwear here.) Bree Olsen, also retired, recently used viral video marketing to bring attention to causes both just (Kony 2012) and ridiculous (her Hollywood Douchebag music video), but still teeters on the brink of the widespread notoriety she apparently desires. Now, another porn starlet is relying on viral video marketing to launch the next stage of her career, this time as a singer, dancer, and all-round hitmaker. The woman in question? “Little” Lupe Fuentes.

Catching a tweet from Evan Seinfeld, Fuentes’ manager and better half, earlier this week, I was aggressively advised to check out a video by an upstart A-pop group – as in J-pop, K-pop, M-pop etc – spearheaded by Fuentes, who appears onscreen in the opening shots of We Are the Party! with bedazzled pink lips, gyrating next to a bunny-headed mascot curiously dubbed “Herewego”. Rife with glitchy Auto-Tune-“enhanced” vocals and a four-on-the-floor dance beat, We Are the Party! seems to be translating the recent wave of international pop hits from the likes of Psy and 2NE1 into a culturally diverse American melange dubbed The Ex-Girlfriends. Joining the Colombia-born Fuentes (under the stage name Lulu Angel) is German-Native American Smash, Japanese-Brazilian Baby J, “black” and French Dee-Love, and Filipino T-Money, creating a far more racially diverse mix than most pop groups upstart or otherwise – just with a pornographic past.

Fuentes, though she professes to be embracing the idea of working in a group based on “true friendship, about supporting each other…like a bunch of girls who had each other’s backs no matter what”, is clearly the star of The Ex-Girlfriends show. (The band’s official bio mentions Lupe nearly twenty times by name, the others only once each.) If Seinfeld has a musical hand in his “little” protege’s latest career endeavor, he’s keeping his mouth shut about his contributions and instead just being as vocally supportive as any other husband; though perhaps he’s just being careful not to alienate fans of his “brutal, unrelenting” new band Attika 7.

The Ex-Girlfriends’ debut single, We Are the Party! is available now on iTunes. The video, which features plenty of salacious shots of the gorgeous (and tiny) Lupe, can be seen below.

Universal Pictures Sues Fifty Shades Parodists

Universal Pictures might be developing the official film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey, the hit erotic fiction trilogy that has had sexually unsatisfied American women all in a tizzy these past months, but it’s not the only entertainment entity attempting to capture the seductive and salacious BDSM-infused story of a virginal college graduate, Anastasia Steele, and dominant business magnate, Christian Grey. Smash Pictures, an adult entertainment studio based out of Chatsworth, California has already completed production on its adaptation, an unofficial one that is now drawing the ire of Universal and the attention of its lawyers. Objecting to Smash’s making a film that flagrantly contradicts the right of Universal, which reportedly paid $4 million for E. L. James’ best sellers in early 2012, to produce its version, which the studio is reportedly negotiating with Angelina Jolie directing and Ryan Gosling taking the role of young multi-millionaire and devoted ass-man, Grey. Smash Pictures, however, contends that only it can do the novels justice.

Universal’s complaint states “By lifting exact dialogue, characters, events, story, and style from the Fifty Shades trilogy, Smash Pictures ensured that the first XXX adaptation was, in fact, as close as possible to the original works.” Smash VP Stuart Wall, named in the complaint alongside Smash owner Daniel Quinn and writer/director Jim Powers, told LA Weekly’s Barbie Davenporte about the company’s recent turn to more romantic fare after years of more explicit stuff, and called their Fifty Shades adaptation “very true to the book and its S&M-themed romance.” Davenporte added “And while parodies are the only way adult film studios can make money these days, making a ‘Fifty Shades’ version is truly the only way to put the three erotic novels in film in their BDSM glory without the MPAA censorship and film industry finger-wagging.” But if Smash and Powers are actually aiming for as close an adaptation as possible, does their claim to fair use of parody, the same legal protection that allows so many other porn parodies to exist, not apply? Without the clear distinction between the two versions of Fifty Shades, Smash’s and Universal’s, and the former already on shelves as the official one slugs through development and preproduction, both parties stand to make or loss a killing.