A way too well-behaved crowd spent the opening hour of the Video Music Awards Sunday night watching Lady Gaga win statuettes and MTV promote its other programs.
And patiently waiting to see how Kanye West and Taylor Swift, Version 2.0, would materialize.
Swift got the first shot in that one, with a new song that seemed to suggest she felt sympathy for the rapper who last year interrupted her acceptance speech at the same VMA awards.
The big news Sunday night, though, was Lady Gaga, who won five awards for which she was nominated: best collaboration for "Telephone" with Beyonce and then four for "Bad Romance": best pop video, best female video, best dance video and video of the year.
In categories where she was not nominated, 30 Seconds To Mars won best rock video for "Kings and Queens" and Eminem won best male video for "Not Afraid."
Eminem did not come on stage to accept the award. While he had opened the show with a medley of "Not Afraid" and his Rihanna duet "Love The Way You Lie," presenter Katy Perry said he left the building before his award was announced.
So it was left to Gaga to scandalize some of the crowd in an unusual way: She showed up in a dress she had worn before.
She had a reason. The baroque dress, which can be seen in her September Vanity Fair shoot, is one of the last dresses Alexander McQueen designed before he committed suicide.
Still, Gaga's choice underscored the unmistakeable whiff of "rerun" surrounding the show, specifically in its repeated attempts to reactivate the buzz from the infamous moment last year when West interrupted Swift's "best female video" acceptance speech.
Both Swift and West were booked to perform Sunday night, with West scheduled to close the show, and Chelsea Handler included a riff about their encounter in her opening monologue.
The problem is that last year's Kanye moment caught a media wave because it felt spontaneous. Last night's efforts to resuscitate the magic did not.
In other pop celebrity moments Sunday night, Lindsay Lohan set herself up for an honorary good sport award with a surprise appearance in a brief skit with Handler. Lohan demanded to know what was in a drink in Handler's hand and said, "You think anyone would work with a drunk?"
Elsewhere, Justin Bieber drove his young fans crazy with an open-air performance and MTV make sure that no segment passed without at least one plug for its "Jersey Shore," Jackass," and Kardashian shows.
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