Jennifer Lopez has enjoyed an iconic career--one that doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon. The multi-hyphenate talent has dominated the realms of music and movies for decades, received an Emmy nomination for her Super Bowl halftime show with Shakira (which caused a ton of FCC complaints), served as a judge for five seasons on American Idol… honestly, the list of accomplishments goes on and on. Add to it the 2022 Generation Award at the MTV Movie & TV Awards, which Lopez picked up on Sunday night, and used the opportunity to call out all of the people who told her she’d never get to that point. Drink that in, haters!
Jennifer Lopez had a long list of people to thank as she accepted the Generation Award during the telecast, covering everyone from her fiancé Ben Affleck to her twins, Max and Emme, who are 14 years old now. But an also-defiant Lopez made sure to save some room for the people who doubted her over the course of her career, saying:
I want to thank the people who gave me joy, and the ones who broke my heart. The ones who were true, and the ones who lied to me. … I want to thank all the people who told me — to my face or when I wasn’t in the room — that I couldn’t do this. I really don’t think I could’ve done it without you.
In hindsight, it has to be pretty ridiculous that anyone, at any stage of her career, thought that JLo didn’t have the talent necessary to carve out a massive place for herself in the entertainment industry. Yes, she’s known for starting as a Fly Girl on the sketch comedy program In Living Color in the early 1990s. But it didn’t take long for Hollywood talent scouts to start putting her into television programs and movies, starting in the earliest days with hits like Money Train before she blew up by playing singer Selena Quintanilla in the 1997 biopic. She even singles out one specific scene from Selena that convinced her to pursue a career in music. And look how that turned out for her!
Watch Jennifer Lopez’s acceptance speech at the 2022 MTV Movie & TV Awards right here, courtesy of MTV:
And if you still love Jennifer Lopez, you are in luck. In addition to the 10 best Jennifer Lopez movies ever made (or even her 6 best romantic comedies), this multi-talent has many projects on the horizon for fans to look forward to. After falling short of an Oscar bid for Hustlers, Lopez will be going back to the rom-com genre for Shotgun Wedding, which we recently learned will be heading to streaming. She also has pending projects titled The Mother and The Godmother, though from what we can tell, they aren’t connected in anyway. Needless to say, while Jennifer Lopez absolutely deserves a Generation Award, the 52-year-old phenom could easily earn another one 20 years from now.
