Seven VMA Nods: Crazy Britney Spears Being Lured as Ratings Bait Again?

It’s that time of the year again — last week nominations were released for MTV’s star-studded and notoriously controversial Video Music Awards. But who should score a whooping seven nods, including the top category for Video of the Year? Britney Spears, y’all.

The songstress will be up against 2009’s hottest acts, Beyonce and Lady Gaga for the coveted prize, prompting numerous industry insiders to question if she really deserved such a slew of nominations for her one and only music video this year, Womanizer, in which she suggestively caresses her seemingly naked body, photocopies her bottom after stomping around a corporate office in a black wig and gets raunchy in the back of a car in her secret-service inspired get-up.

“We were surprised she got so many nominations because she has been ‘lip synching’ and while she is talented, the terrain has changed so this may be sympathy nominations because she is getting well,” said a key industry insider. “Every network is hurting for eyeballs. Britney always draws an audience.”

But let’s not forget that it was because of the troubled Tinseltowner’s sedated-like opening performance in 2007 that the VMAs surged into a whole new ratings stratosphere.

“When I first saw it I started to panic,” an MTV advertising executive told Tarts at the time. “But I soon realized that this was great, it was obviously going to get a lot of attention around the world.”

Last year, Brit was ratings-gold for the VMAs (viewership was up 41 percent from two years prior) thanks to her over hyped ‘comeback’ - although this time she didn’t have to sing and dance, she just had to gratuitously accept three moonmen for her musical abilities. Interestingly, those three VMAs were the first Spears had ever won although she had previously received 16 nominations. Her 1999 debut album “Baby One More Time” remains the highest-selling album by a female pop artist of all time but even then she only scored three nominations.

So does Brit really now deserve seven nods or is MTV trying to not-so-subtly steer Spears back to the stage, for better or for worse?

Her former music producer and good friend, the Grammy winning Dallas Austin, even admitted she was quite “a singer.”

“Britney is very normal, very average. She’s fun, she likes to play games, it’s sad because Hollywood makes you into a person that you don’t want to be,” Austin told us. “She can sing, but it’s different than being a singer and a person who can sing. The average person can sing pretty much, you can sing along to it in the car and you’ll probably be in the same pitch. But then there’s people who can’t sing, and they’re tone deaf and they can’t hear the pitch that the song is in. That’s a different story. Britney Spears, Janet Jackson, Aaliyah - there are a lot of people with really great tones that aren’t going to sing like Celine Dion or Whitney Houston.”

Source: Fox News