Stephen Hill Responds To 2011 BET Award Nomination Backlash

BET's Executive Vice President of Entertainment & Music Programming, Stephen Hill, heard what you said about the 2011 BET Award nominations.  Folks were up in arms--both celebs and fans--about certain folks grabbing nods and certain folks not grabbing nods.

But Mr. Hill is giving his 2 cents on what really went down with that Best Female Hip Hop Artist category and more when you read on...
Trina and other folks popped off on Twitter right after the announcements the other day.  And it was F-word laced and not pretty.  Folks are pissy because it seemed BET was totally out of touch not nominating Trina for Best Female Hip Hop Artist, yet nominating 3 people folks have never heard of.  And obviously setting up the category for Nicki Minaj to win.
Folks were also pissy about Chris Brown grabbing a Best Actor nomination, amongst other things.  So Stephen Hill went to bat for the nominations in an interview with the network's site.  Here's some excerpts:

Why wasn’t Trina nominated in the Female Hip Hop category?

Okay, that was because Trina didn’t submit a video that was in during the eligibility period. Let me back up. To be eligible, here’s what you have to have: a video that’s submitted and then first played on BET...between April 1 of one year and March 30 of the next year. So for this eligibility period it would be April 1 of 2010 to March 30 of 2011. She did not release a video to us in that time. “Million Dollar Girl” came in March. I think it was March 12 or so of 2010. And so she was in last year’s nominees for that. While she was featured in Lola Monroe’s video, the rules are you have to release a video of your own. You have to be the primary artist on it. You can’t be just the feature artist and be eligible. So that’s why Lola Monroe was eligible but Trina was not for this year because it came out this year. So I’ve reached out to her camp. I’ve talked to the head of her label. And actually the only reason I might get off this call is because I may be getting a call from Trina while this call is going on.
If she calls you just go ahead and jump off.
And I want to be clear: We love Trina, we work with Trina. She performed “Million Dollar Girl” on Rip the Runway in February of 2010. So we love Trina. We definitely understand that it’s a misunderstanding. And I’ll tell you now, if I were Trina and I’d released something during the eligibility period and it had not been nominated, I probably would’ve had a little bit of side-eye too. But the truth is she just wasn’t in the eligibility period.
Trina wasn’t the only one throwing the side-eye. Diamond shouted her out on Twitter, and even Nicki Minaj criticized the nominees. Does that concern you at all?
No, no, honestly. Because they were all operating off of false information basically. They all believed that Trina was eligible to be nominated. I love that. They were supporting each other. Far too many times in hip hop people want to tear each other down or not support each other. So even though it was at our expense, you have all these women supporting each other in the hip hop field. So hopefully people will feel better once the truth comes out, once they realize that there was no eligibility there. But absent that, if them not knowing the rules fostered some camaraderie, I’m all in.

The drama with Nicki Minaj and the lack of female hip hop artists....

In the female hip hop category, there is one very strong nominee and three others who are not as prominent. Why not just have a best rapper award and let Nicki Minaj compete against the guys?
Here’s what I think: We have this category as an aspirational category. Right now, there are very few women who put out hip hop videos. I will share with you: How many women do you think presented hip hop videos to BET in the eligibility period?
Based on the nominees I would guess four.
You are correct. Exactly four. So when your nomination level is five, everyone who submits a video is nominated. Now people might want to laugh at that. But I hope the same people who laugh at that realize that they were the people who were upset when that category was taken out of the Grammys. Right? Everybody was up in arms. So we’re going to keep it in. You know why? For the same reason that we aired My Mic Sounds Nice last year. It’s to hopefully encourage women. That show should have been one big hour-long ball of encouragement [for women] to start writing rhymes and call themselves MCs and start down that path. We’re going to keep this category in the show even if there’s two nominees. If there’s no nominees, we’re gonna keep this category in the show because one day down the line it’s going to be filled just like the men.
Really? Even if there are no nominees?
Yeah.
How would that work?
We would have that category there if nothing else just to make a point.
Just an empty nominee slot?
I gotta tell you, I hope it’s never empty. I hope the success of folks like Trina and Nicki and Diamond and Cymphonique and Lola will encourage women to pick up a pen. Like I said, let people laugh, but we’re fully behind women in hip hop. It wasn’t just about My Mic Sounds Nice. It’s about this, and all the energy we’re getting around this… Hopefully in a few years people will be arguing because there were too many people who were vying for the spot.

And the drama with Breezy...

Speaking of movies, I’ve seen a few bloggers who have questioned Chris Brown’s nomination for Best Actor. Any thoughts on that?
My thought on that is as follows: We assembled the Academy. We try to make it as varied as possible. But when the Academy comes back with their results—again, it’s not any of our individual shows—that’s the decision we’ve made, to trust the Academy. When they come back with a decision, we stick by that decision.

Well there you have it.  Check out the full interview over at BET.  Thoughts?