Emerson Phillips
Jennifer Lopez received the Generation Award at the 2022 MTV Movie & TV Awards on Sunday, and she offered “a different kind of list of thank-you’s” during her acceptance speech.
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The Generation Award “celebrates beloved actors whose diverse contributions to both film and television have turned them into household names.”
Lopez’s IMDB page lists 28 movies to her credit, beginning with My Little Girl in 1986.
“I look at those movies and I see all the wonderful people that I’ve been blessed to know and to work with,” she said during her acceptance speech. “You’re only as good as the people that you work with, and if you’re lucky, they may make you better. And I have been very lucky in that regard. As an actor, I’m not any of the women that I’ve played, but there is a part of what is deeply true to me in each one of those characters.”
She then went on to talk about her “truth,” and she thank a number of people whom she did not name.
“Since you cannot create truth unless you’ve really lived it, I have a different kind of list of thank-you’s tonight,” she began. “I want to thank all the people who gave me this life. I want to thank the people who gave me joy and the ones who broke my heart. The ones who were true and the ones who lied to me. I want to thank true love and I want to thank the way that I lied to myself because that’s how I knew that I had to grow.
“I want to thank disappointment and failure for teaching me to be strong and my children for teaching me to love,” she continued. “I want to thank all the people who told me, to my face or when I wasn’t in the room, that I couldn’t do this. I really don’t think I could have done it without you.”
And of course, she thanked her fans.
“You are the reason that I am here,” she said to her fans as her eye filled with tears.
And last, she thanked her manager, Benny Medina.
“He’s more than just my manager,” Lopez said. “If there’s one person who believed in me from the beginning and the first time I played him a raggedy little demo of a song that I had wrote that day – he never let me stop believing in myself – it was him.
“You know when someone’s at your side, you know when they’re there when you’re at your lowest and most hopeless point that you will never forget it and you never want to let them down,” she continued. “And there were times so low, I think, I kept going more for you than for myself.”
