In case you missed last night’s MTV Video Music Awards, Taylor Swift won Video of the Year and host Miley Cyrus wore umpteen outlandish costumes and flashed America on camera. No surprises there. But one thing that did surprise us for a moment was a group of Bollywood dancers who were part of an Instagram selfie skit during Cyrus’s opening monologue.
In an homage to Ellen DeGeneres’s 2014 Oscar’s selfie, and in an effort to take, like, the most epic selfie ever, Cyrus brainstormed with actors Ike Barinholtz and Andy Samberg. MTV captioned its video clip of the skit: “Go behind the scenes as Miley Cyrus takes an epic selfie with some crazy characters during the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards!”
The Bollywood dancers looked sharp in their outfits and jewelry and joined Frankenstein and his bride, Rita Ora swimming in spaghetti, the green Smurf knock-offs the Scurfs, fake Popes and others to say “Marijuana!” (instead of cheese) and look in the direction of Cyrus’s selfie stick-held phone.
Is this kind of awesome? Were the dancers Cyrus’s way of appropriating desi culture with desi people as props? Why were they reading books instead of dancing? These are all intriguing questions, but like the selfie itself, you could say it’s all a bit blurry.
