<I>AVN</i> Award Nominations Announced

The nominations for the 2004 AVN Awards were announced last week. They contain some fresh faces as well as some legends, works by established studios and by start ups, and even some new categories.

Download the full list of nominations" target="_new"\n > here.

The winners will be announced at the 21st annual AVN Awards show to be held on January 10, 2004 in at the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Multiple AVN Award-winner Jenna Jameson will host the event for her third time, joined by Jim Norton, an East Coast comic who draws large audiences all over the country.

"This is Jenna's third year hosting the show and she's her popularity is just amazing, so she'll be a great host," Gary Miller, the producer of the AVN Awards show said. "And Jim Norton will be great compliment for her, he really gets the idea of what we're doing and he's definitely into it."

"And he's hilarious," Miller added.

One of the show's musical guest will be hip-hop artist Lil' Jon, performing his hit song "Get Low," with special guests the Ying Yang twins. "Get Low" has been on the Billboard charts for 33 weeks, and at one time was the number one song in the country. More musical acts will be named before the show.

"This will be our best year ever. We have higher quality production equipment and staff than we've ever had before," Miller said.

Veteran director Paul Thomas's Heart of Darkness, earned 14 nominations, including Best Film and Best Director,and Elegant Angel's debut feature film Compulsion earned 13.

Adam & Eve's Rawhide, a Western porn vehicle for their exclusive performer Carmen Luvana, led the pack for Video categories earning 15 nominations. Right behind that title was Wicked Pictures Beautiful, an adult interpretation of Snow White, with 14 nominations.

"With over 7,000 new productions in all categories to look at this year, the staff did an amazing job coming up with this list of nominees," said Paul Fishbein, president of AVN. "We spent three weeks locked up in an office arguing about porn. It was exhausting, but I think the staff nailed it."

The new categories are Transsexual Performer of the Year, Best Amateur Tape, Best Amateur Series, Best Marketing Website - Production Company and Best Retail Website. In addition, the categories for ethnic-themed videos were broken into three: Best Black, Latin and Asian.

In the late 1990s, AVN changed its Best Amateur Tape and Best Amateur Series Awards categories to Best Pro-Am or Amateur Tape and Best Pro-Am or Amateur Series. Starting with the 2004 Awards Show, amateur productions and pro-am productions have been divided into different categories.

The new Best Amateur Tape and Best Amateur Series categories are for completely amateur productions.

Pro-Am productions, those amateur productions with professional directors or performers, will be recognized in the Best Pro-Am Tape and Best Pro-Am Series categories.

The Best Marketing Website category is for free sites, designed to promote video production companies. If it's a pay site, it doesn't qualify. Neither do porn performers' sites.

The Best Retail Website category is for non-pay sites that sell adult products.

Download the full list of nominations " target=\n "_new" > here.