2026 VMA Video of the Year - You Vote
Six nominees, ranked on two tests and nothing else: how much a piece tries to build, and whether it holds together across its full runtime. Ambition first, structure as the check. Not the song. Not the year the artist had. Not the nomination count. Applied honestly, that rule reorders the ballot, because scale and coherence almost never turn up in the same package. Two entries clear both tests and they sit at the top. Under them: a fourteen-minute anthology that swings harder than anything else here and doesn't carry every chapter; a small piece that holds completely but never reaches; and a run of gorgeous images with nothing joining one to the next. Last is the one that meant to be modest and was. Voting closes 25 September at vote.mtv.com, and the order below is an argument rather than a forecast.
- 1
Sabrina Carpenter — Tears
Bardia Zeinali sets a Rocky Horror homage in an abandoned farmhouse and commits to the bit: Colman Domingo in drag, a player piano, a cornfield, and the hands coming out of the walls that strip her to white lingerie. It holds from first shot to last, which the entry above it doesn't. What it never does is reach: one location, one gag, sustained beautifully. Structure without scale, and scale is the first test.
- 2
GENER8ION — STORM (starring Yung Lean)
Romain Gavras built a near-future boarding school where no adults exist, then let seven and a half minutes run without a line of dialogue. The school photograph scene is where it tips: rows of boys holding a pose, then moving as one. Damien Jalet's choreography carries the back half. Yung Lean plays the bully who runs the place. Feature-grade direction on a music video budget.
- 3
Ariana Grande — hate that i made you love me
Christian Breslauer directs, Janusz Kamiński shoots, and Justin Long does the acting in a horror comedy about a haunting that keeps flipping which of the two is the ghost. Justin Long engulfed in flames is the shot everyone quotes, but the desert burial and the bunker of songwriting journals are what give it a spine. Beginning, turn, ending.
- 4
Madonna — Confessions II – The Film
Fourteen minutes, six songs, six chapters, and a cast running from Sabrina Carpenter to Kate Moss. TORSO shoot it like a fashion film with a plot bolted on, and the best image in it is a small one: the red lipstick mark on the airbag after the crash. Nothing else here swings this hard. It is also six pieces in a row, and the chapters don't carry the same weight.
- 5
Taylor Swift — The Fate of Ophelia
Swift wrote and directed it herself, shot it with Rodrigo Prieto, and moves through a Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, a Marilyn-style burlesque turn, a sixties go-go dancer and a Busby Berkeley water number before the half-submerged bathtub shot that matches the album cover. Reach, it has: every frame is expensive and considered. What it hasn't got is anything joining one frame to the next, so it plays as a costume reel. Gorgeous tableaux, no spine.
- 6
Bruno Mars — I Just Might
Green suit, one performer, multiplied. The 1970s soundstage full of Brunos is the whole idea, and Mars co-directed with Daniel Ramos to make it look like a variety-show taping somebody dug out of a vault. Charming, and it does exactly what it sets out to do. It holds because there is so little to hold: the smallest swing here, a performance clip rather than a film.
