As you know by now, Green Day lost the “Best Act Ever” award at the MTV EMAs to 80s pop singer Rick Astley.

There are some music industry awards that Green Day seems to consider a genuine honor. When they were nominated for a Grammy for Album of the Year for American Idiot (which they lost, though they won Best Rock Album the same year), they seemed to appreciate their peers’ recognition of their work, especially after years of having been dismissed as snot-nosed pop-punkers with the success of Dookie, which has always been, in my opinion, a first-rate album that was greatly underrated by many music critics.

But I wouldn’t guess that they care very much about a somewhat silly award like Best Act Ever from the MTV EMAs. Given people’s varying tastes for different types of music, there’s no such thing as a “best act ever,” and if one were to try to come up with one by applying somewhat objective standards, Tokio Hotel and Britney Spears would arguably not even be in that category. So I for one am not at all displeased that the whole somewhat nonsensical affair was highjacked by the pranksters behind the Rickrolling craze.

The turn of events is best described in an article in The Times. Last year, 79 million votes were cast for the MTV EMA awards in all categories. This year, Astley received more than 100 million votes, more than the total votes cast for every other winner combined.

Rick Astley himself, who declined to participate in the awards show despite reports that MTV “begged” him to come, said: “I just felt it was a bit of a daft award. How can you present the best act in the world ever? It was just a bit ridiculous.”

The reasons behind Rickrolling the awards are not just to have a bit of fun, but also to stage a kind of tongue-in-cheek protest of the tactics of the music industry — and major players within it like MTV — to try to shape what the public should like and what music people should buy. The Rickrolling pranksters were saying, in effect: you want to manipulate us, well, we can manipulate you, and have a giggle doing it too. Rick Astley, who should be commended for getting the joke instead of getting a swelled head, said, “It shows you can’t decide what people want at the end of the day. You can try and ram it down their throats but you can’t.”

On a more serious note, the awards show was a showcase for the excitement that many are feeling over the election of Barack Obama to the US presidency.