Pucker Up! Highlights From the MTV Movie Awards Best Kiss Category

Gwynne Watkins
Updated

Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling at the 2005 awards (Getty Images)

First presented in 1992, the MTV Movie Awards (airing this Sunday) may never match the spontaneity and irreverence of those early years. Thankfully, the Best Kiss award continues to be a wild card: fun, unpredictable, and totally unique among major awards shows. Let’s take a look back at the MTV Movie Award category that has always been our favorite (except in 1996, when they gave out that award for Best Sandwich in a Movie).

1992: The first-ever Best Kiss Award is accepted by Anna Chlumsky for the smooch she gave Macauley Culkin in the coming-of-age tearjerker My Girl. “Gee, this is my first kiss, and I get an award!” says 11-year-old Chlumsky, in a speech almost as adorable as the kiss itself.

2000: This is when Best Kiss starts to get interesting. After years of flirty-awkward acceptance speeches from pairs like Christian Slater and Marisa Tomei (1993 winners for Untamed Heart) and Jim Carrey and Lauren Holly (1995 winners for Dumb and Dumber), Cruel Intentions co-stars Selma Blair and Sarah Michelle Gellar become the first winners to kiss during their acceptance speech. It’s just a chaste peck, but the crowd eats it up.

2005: The finest moment in the Best Kiss category (and possibly all of MTV Movie Awards history) occurs when Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams re-create their big kiss from The Notebook, even taking a running start to warm up the crowd. The moment gives Notebook lovers plenty of fan-fiction material until Gosling and McAdams go public with their real-life romance a few months later. (They split in 2007.)

2009-2012: Twilight takes over the Best Kiss category and adds a whole new will-they-or-won’t-they-element: Will Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson give fans a peek at their secretive off-screen romance by locking lips onstage? The answer, for four years running, is “no.” But they do invent some creative evasions. In 2009, they tease the audience with a fake-out…

…And in 2011, Pattinson runs into the audience to kiss Taylor Lautner.

2015? It’s been a couple years since anyone has made out onstage, so let’s hope this year’s winners re-ignite the tradition. Nominees include The Amazing Spider-Man 2’s Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield; Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans; Neighbors’ Rose Byrne and Halston Sage; The Fault in Our Stars’ Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort; and the one pair who will almost definitely kiss if they win, The Interview’s James Franco and Seth Rogen.