It took a while, but I was distracted by personal life stuff. This year’s AVN Expo was smaller and cheaper than last year’s wallet shock of a show. Resorts World is still a very expensive venue when it comes to food and drinks, but moving the show off the same week as CES made it more affordable.
Chanel Camryn
As such, most of the industry was staying at the host hotel rather than the backup hotel. The show itself was hosted in a smaller area with less exhibitors compared to last year. That was fine because I didn’t have to move around as much. Even though there was less attendance due to the lack of CES crossover, the crowd density remained the same. At some point, I was jostling in a river of crowd traffic with my camera banging against people including one person that was carrying a motorcycle helmet for some reason.
CC Doll, Aria Valencia, Sky Pierce, Rissa May, Harley Haze at Hookup Hotshots
The best booth at the show was a new one from Hookup Hotshots. The beautiful starlets signing there were accessible and there were backgrounds to shoot them against without a crowd. Angela White, Abella Danger, and Violet Myers had the longest lines at the convention, and Brazzers seemed to have the busiest booth.
Angela White
Abella Danger
Violet Myers
I did not party too hard this year with all of the distractions and was more busy walking girls back to their room since there were so many predators out and about.
I stayed away from the awards red carpet and watched The Royal Rumble instead. Congratulations to the deserving Chanel Camryn for winning Best New Starlet though.
The AVN Adult Entertainment Expo returned to Las Vegas this month after a 3-year absence due to the coronavirus pandemic. This year, it was concurrent with the return of the Consumer Electronic Show, something that hadn’t happened since 2011. Because of crossover attendance, this was the busiest AEE that I remember but also the most expensive. Prices for rooms, food, and transit have jacked up since the three years.
The host Resorts World is huge, and I saw families with children walking around the facilities which did not happen when AEE was at the Hard Rock. Because of this, there was a more restrictive dress code that people were expected to adhere to when leaving the confines of the convention. Given the size and complexity of the show and the limited production staff, it was definitely a success. Sure, there were quirks that can be ironed out at future shows but that happens at every new venue.
Angel YoungsBlake BlossomLeana Lovings
Besides the adjoining Adult Novelty Expo, AEE featured three main halls. One focused on production companies and webcam platforms, one focused on the gay side of the industry, and the last was mainly talent agencies. At any given point of the day from opening to close, you could find new people to meet walking back and forth between the halls. With the production company booths, most talent had 4 hour signing shifts while the talent at the agencies booth and the AVN booth averaged around 2 hours.
Vicki ChaseViolet MyersRiley Reid
Outside of the actual expo grounds, Vixen rented space in the Resorts World mall to host a pop-up store featuring their clothing line and contract stars. Riley Reid appeared for two days exhibiting her Eighteen Plus clothing line, and the overall line to get into the store lasted about 3 hours.
So weird thing happened to me. After the end of the expo with drink in hand, I was trying to find a ticket for IAFD spokeswoman, Alex Blake, to walk the red carpet for the AVN Awards. When the nice producer saw that I had a press badge for IAFD, he handed me a press badge to be behind the Awards red carpet. I was not prepared to shoot the Awards since I had not charged my camera and flashes after finishing the expo, and I was already 30 minutes late for the call time.
After sheepishly explaining to Alex what had happened and cancelling two shoots, I ran up to my room to throw on my suit, grabbed my camera and strobe, and came back down. The only space that was available was at the end of the carpet what was only half covered by a wall background. I shared my spot with two guys, Jay of Jay’s Playhouse and Bobby of Girlsincars or something similar to that, who were great guys as we coordinated our shots rather than compete with each other. I took about 3-4 shots per look and tried not to miss anyone, but several people skipped us since we were the end of the line and they just wanted to move on.
Female Performer of the Year Kira NoirAVN Awards host Abella DangerFavourite Female Performer Angela White
The carpet started at 5:30pm and kept going until 9pm with 750+ walkers. It does not need to be this grueling. They tried to limit the walkers to nominees, but the problem is that there are too many nominees! Most categories have around 10 nominations each (some with multiple performers), but the fan award categories can have 20-30 nominations with no overlap with the other categories. This Oprah approach builds interest but is too overwhelming on the red carpet. Perhaps the fan awards should be separated into another event.
As for the Awards themselves, they went pretty much as predicted. We were correct with several of our projections. I was pleased as fuck to see Kira Noir win Female Performer of the Year; not just because of its historic nature but that she is one of the nicest and best people in the industry. Congratulations.
Miscellaneous
Because of the expense and limited room blocks, it seemed like more talent stayed outside of Resorts World so you wouldn’t see them at night outside of the expo. I was reluctant to leave Resorts World out of laziness so I mostly stuck to the events that were hosted there.
Alex Blake at the AVN White party
I mostly hung out with my boys at IAFD and AdultDVDTalk along with IAFD spokeswoman Alex Blake. I would like to thank Mark Spiegler, Don Juan de Marko, Tim Von Swine, and East Coast Talent for their hospitality at several events into the late hour.
Liz JordanChanel Camryn
Thank you, Liz, Chanel, and Alex for making magic with me.
Now that 2023’s AEE/X3 shows are behind us, let’s take an even further look back at the 1989 Winter CES show.
Photographer John A. Mozzer (who is also known around these parts as performer Alan Adrian) shared a bunch of photos he took around the 1989 Winter CES – when the adult exhibitors were tucked away on the second floor of the Sahara, and private parties were where you rubbed your elbows.
We can’t recommend enough getting lost and clicking around John’s meticulously captioned galleries over on SmugMug – it’s a cornucopia of the NYC downtown scene (and elsewhere) peppered with some familiar faces and a really great eye for the candid…
Click on the picture below to see the rest of the CES gallery:
It’s that time of year again! Time for the Annotated list of AVN Awards nominees for 2023. (Really, the material is from 2022, but the show is in 2023, so they call it 2023.)
Wow! We did it. We actually voted in every non-retail-pleasure category that we could vote for, and I have to thank my colleagues for pulling this off. It’s not like we did this in any organised manner like assigning categories so that everything would be covered. The most important thing was coming to a consensus since we had to rank every nominee in a given category.
I still think there are too many nominees in each category, but you have to keep everyone but the voters happy. Are there really more than 5 contenders in a given category that could or should win, and if there are, what does it say about about the indiscriminate evaluation or quality of what we are reviewing?
Each voter has their own criteria on how they judge the category. I generally defer to my colleagues in categories that I am clueless about or disinterested in. It would not be fair to the nominees if I tried to vote in every category, and it was crucial that we did have someone that knew their shit in specific categories. For example, Best Soundtrack: Would I listen to and enjoy this porn groove if it was outside a porno? The answer would frankly be no to every soundtrack that has ever been nominated. Same with Best Makeup: I appreciate the beauty that makeup brings when it is pertinent to the story, but most of the time the makeup I appreciate most is one where the viewer wouldn’t even notice.
Here is a sampling of our picks for the 2022 AVN Awards:
Like I mentioned last year, Jane Wilde is such a filthy performer, and Jonni Darkko, technically proficient cameraman and director, combine to make great showcases. Love, Sex, and Lawyers continues perhaps a series of movies by Will Ryder, unrelated except by title. This romantic comedy is lighthearted and funny, and I like watching Kenna James having sex.
Known mostly for his comedies and parodies, Will Ryder is a self-deprecating perfectionist or pessimist. His movies may not have the extensive budget of his competition, but Ryder writes the screenplays and squeezes every last take to get the shot that he wants for his vision, often to the exasperation of his production partner, Scott David.
Big surprise that Maitland Ward, with extensive mainstream acting experience, would be the best actor in porn today. It is obvious that she enjoys the amount of control in her scenes both in and out of the storyline.
The IAFD staff like buxom blondes like Blake Blossom and Britney Amber, but we also like lithe redheads like Lottie Magne so we don’t have a particular preference with looks in picking performers. Performance over the voting period does matter, and it’s not just clicking off the checkboxes of acts that you can see on our website. It’s whether they consistently put out great scenes even while their co-stars and productions constantly change.
Reviewing the myriad scene categories confirmed that Gia Derza is an incredible performer. Her beautiful eyes accentuates every blowjob that she gives, and she throws every hole into sexual abandonment while moaning and squeaking into ecstasy. That’s my best Don Juan de Marko impression that I can do because I’ve ran out of words to describe just how great it is to watch her on screen.
[NOTE FROM JEFF: If I had to change anything about the awards process, it would be the voting site we have to use. It’s a simple list of nominees on one side and we drag them in order to the other side to cast our vote. Simple enough task, but the source list is unsorted, so it’s harder than necessary to find Angela White’s name when it’s buried somewhere in the bottom third of the list instead of at the top where the A’s should be sorted. (I do concede that perhaps there’s a reason for the random ordering in the source list – random ordering might keep the list free from unconscious bias. By way of example, I had a client who named their company so it started with an AB so they’d be at the top of every list of sponsors they were listed in.)
We vote via spreadsheet and we average out our scores so a polarizing performer might end up in the middle of the pack instead of at either extreme. This year I didn’t watch nearly as much as I had in the past, so my role was mostly as tiebreaker – visiting those specific scenes/performers and then voting between those. The ties were almost exclusively middle-of-the-pack; I don’t think I had to break any win/place/show ties….]
