Once every few months for the last two decades, the same somewhat-grainy 30-second clip is discovered anew. In it, Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling saunter toward one another across a stage as Maroon 5’s “She Will Be Loved” plays. They have just won the MTV Movie Award for best kiss in The Notebook—but their impassioned recreation of the kiss seems a lot more popular online than the original.
Nothing is more American than indulging in nostalgia for a simpler time—an era before social media or DeuxMoi sightings, where an onstage kiss between costars turned real-life couple held true novelty. If the clip isn’t committed to memory just yet, it goes something like this:
Before accepting the honor for 2005’s best onscreen lip lock, Gosling and McAdams remove their respective black blazers from opposite sides of the MTV Awards stage. She adjusts her strapless corset top as he beckons her closer. Gosling then hoists McAdams into his arms for a steamy kiss, as she wraps her legs around his torso. The camera pans to Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff, once sworn enemies, who are united in their overjoyed reactions. Gosling visibly chews gum as he carries McAdams to the podium, where his-and-hers golden popcorn trophies await them. In lieu of an acceptance speech, Gosling offers a perfectly timed, “It was my pleasure.”
McAdams and Gosling’s victory was no surprise. Their stiffest competition that year was Garden State’s Natalie Portman and Zach Braff, another cinematic relic of early-aughts romance. But the way they accepted the award shocked even those running the live broadcast. “We just hoped that they’d do something fun,” MTV producer Joel Gallen, who directed that year’s show, told The Ringer in 2022. “They had this 10-second kiss and the place went nuts. I don’t even remember what they said after that. It was just this electric moment.”
It would’ve been far easier for the pair to play it cool. At the time, Gosling was on the precipice of his first Oscar nomination, McAdams was riding high on the success of Mean Girls, one of MTV’s most-awarded films that year. (It tied with Napoleon Dynamite, if you can believe it.) At the time, Gallen said, not even the show’s producers knew they were actually dating—meaning that the onstage kiss served as what we’d now call their relationship hard launch.
The MTV Movie Award for best kiss has long served as a time capsule. Inaugural honors, bizarrely enough, went to My Girl’s Macaulay Culkin and Anna Chlumsky, who accepted the honor with a sheepish, “Gee, my first kiss and I get an award.” (Their fellow nominees ran the gamut from Anjelica Huston and Raúl Juliá in The Addams Family to Juliette Lewis and Robert De Niro in Cape Fear. Pure chaos!) Subsequent recipients included everyone from Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore for The Wedding Singer to Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger for Brokeback Mountain, as well as Twilight costars and former couple Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart—who claimed best kiss honors four years in a row, from 2009 to 2012.
Read More
