Madonna at the 2021 VMAs John Shearer/MTV VMAs 2021/Getty Images/MTV/ViacomCBS

More than 40 years after Madonna lost her shoe and kicked up her skirt at the inaugural MTV Video Music Awards, the Queen of Pop is still the Queen of the VMAs. 

Our collective cultural understanding of what the MTV Video Music Awards represent, or at least did at a point in time, is built on the foundation of every performance Madonna delivered there. “Like a Virgin” at the first show, the “Vogue” performance that closed out the show in 1990, “Hollywood” with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera in 2003: Madonna both defined and constantly redefined the standard for a VMAs performance. “The first year, it was everything we could do to get talent to come to the event and fill the seats,” Bob Pittman, one of MTV’s founders, once said. “By the second year, every act wanted to be on the bill.”

Her performances created a pathway for iconic appearances from every generation of pop since, from Spears to Lady Gaga to Chappell Roan. Every year, fewer viewers tune into the VMAs, but the ones who still watch do so in the hopes of witnessing a moment that feels even close to what Madonna has done or inspired. It’s what makes her the quintessential VMAs artist. 

Earlier this week, Madonna scored 11 nominations for the 2026 VMAs, which air Sunday, Sept. 27. Her latest record, Confessions II, celebrated as her best album in 20 years and a spirited follow-up to 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, was accompanied by a short film that led to this wealth of nominations. Madonna’s nominations include Artist of the Year, Video of the Year, Best Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Choreography, Best Art Direction, Best Visual Effects, and Best Editing, plus Song of the Year and Best Collaboration for the Sabrina Carpenter-assisted “Bring Your Love.” 

MTV even brought the Best Dance category back for the first time since 2019. Confessions II — The Film is nominated in the category alongside releases from Harry Styles, Zara Larsson and PinkPantheress, Lady Gaga and Doechii, Slayyyter, and more. No one knows dance quite like Madonna. “People think that dance music is superficial, but they’ve got it all wrong,” she says on the Confessions II track “One Step Away.” “The dance floor is not just a place, it’s a threshold/A ritualistic space where movement replaces language.” This was once true of the VMAs, too. The awards show reflected a relentless pursuit of pop spectacle, and its statement performances signaled shifts in culture, consumption, and perspective. 

“They said we wouldn’t last, but we are still here, motherfuckers,” Madonna said onstage in New York at the 2021 VMAs. That year, MTV celebrated 40 years on the air and Madonna celebrated how much her move to the city in the late Seventies changed everything for her. “We found each other and formed a bond that changed my life, changed music, and created a whole new art form,” she said in a voiceover. “That’s why there’s only one place to be tonight.” Her surprise appearance was more memorable than most of the performances that night, save for maybe when Lil Nas X locked Jack Harlow in a cage and delivered a slippery shower routine for “Industry Baby.” 

This year, the VMAs will return to Los Angeles for the first time since 2017, when the event was hosted at the Forum. The setting for this year’s show is a much smaller room, but no less familiar. The Peacock Theater was the Microsoft Theater when it hosted the 2015 show and the Nokia Theater when it hosted the 2010 and 2011 shows. By then, Madonna had already begun somewhat of an extended hiatus from the VMAs that lasted more than a decade. She showed up here and there, paying tribute to Michael Jackson in 2009 and popping up backstage with Maluma in 2018, but otherwise was absent from the ceremonies and the nominations, despite releasing three chart-topping albums in the 2010s. 

She’d been nominated extensively throughout the 2000s, but hasn’t taken anything home since “Beautiful Stranger” won Best Video from a Film in 1999. Madonna earned a nomination for the Justin Timberlake-assisted “4 Minutes” in 2008, but wasn’t nominated again until 2022, when her concert film Madame X landed in the Best Longform Video category. This year could bring Madonna her first VMAs win in 27 years. She has devoted fans younger than that. For the past decade and a half, they have watched as the VMAs have steadily deteriorated in cultural capital.

Almost nothing about the VMAs feels the same these days. Year after year, the nominations often seem like they were hastily pulled together at the last minute after someone remembered there needed to be actual nominees in order for the show to exist. The awards part of MTV Video Music Awards, remember? And yet, Madonna endures.

Madonna’s presence at the show, even in her absence, has never been entirely about the awards, but this batch of 11 nominations feels like a hopeful indicator that the true spirit of the VMAs is still somewhere in there. Forty years ago, in 1986, Madonna became the first woman to be awarded the Video Vanguard Award. Janet Jackson went on to win in 1990, but after that, another woman didn’t take that honor until Spears was honored in 2011. All the while, the women who took the stage at each year’s VMAs did so wanting to deliver a performance worth remembering. There’s a reason there hasn’t been a male Video Vanguard honoree since 2015. 

Performers for this year’s show, as well as the 2026 Video Vanguard recipient, haven’t been revealed, yet. If we’re lucky, Madonna will get another chance to show these pop stars how the Queen of the VMAs gets down.

From Rolling Stone US.