Bewitched! WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier score big wins at MTV Movie & TV Awards

If lockdowns and production delays made 2020 a quiet year for all the genre fun that had us spoiled in pre-pandemic times, you’d never know it from all the fan love at Sunday’s MTV Movie & TV Awards. While other ceremonies throughout this awards season were unusually light on sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and animation, genre projects picked up plenty of golden popcorn — with none bewitching fans more than WandaVision.

Marvel’s supernatural tale of grief deferred scored a total of four MTV honors, which tally fan feedback into determining the big winners. WandaVision beat out a slew of big-name nominees to earn this year’s Best Show trophy, leading a field that also included Cobra Kai, The Boys, Bridgerton, and Emily in Paris.

Elizabeth Olsen conjured a win in the Best Performance in a Show category for her role as Wanda (aka the Scarlet Witch), while Kathryn Hahn spellbound fans by winning Best Villain. The series’ epic, good-witch vs. bad-witch final showdown between the two stars also earned WandaVision a fourth golden popcorn trophy for Best Fight, beating out a bevy of barnstorming brawls from Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), Cobra Kai, The Boys, and Zack Snyder’s Justice League for the honor.

“I’ve loved playing this part for seven years,” joked Olsen in accepting her Best Performance popcorn, shouting out the legion of Marvel faithful worldwide as “just the greatest fans anyone can have.” Longtime MCU actors leaping from the big screen to pick up a small-screen award for Disney+ turned out to be a recurring theme, with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier also scoring a pair of MTV award shout-outs.

Anthony Mackie left a whole squad of super-powered stars in his wake, taking home the prize for Best Hero for his small-screen debut as Sam Wilson (aka Falcon) in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Mackie blasted past fellow nominees Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman 1984), Jack Quaid (The Boys), Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian), and Teyonah Parris (WandaVision) to stand atop the hero hill, while both he and Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes, aka the Winter Soldier) shared the trophy for Best Duo.

The Best Duo win put Falcon ahead of another Disney+ pair, with fellow genre nominee The Mandalorian (for Pedro Pascal’s Din Djarin and, of course, Baby Yoda) watching from the sidelines. Though The Mandalorian was nominated in both the Best Hero and Best Villain categories (the latter for Giancarlo Esposito’s performance as Moff Gideon), the Star Wars small-screen spinoff ended the evening empty-handed.

Elsewhere, Victoria Pedretti scared up a win for Most Frightened Performance for The Haunting of Bly Manor, in the process creeping past a terrifyingly talented field that also included Elisabeth Moss (The Invisible Man), Jurnee Smollett (Lovecraft Country), Vince Vaughn (Freaky), and Simona Brown (Behind Her Eyes). Pixar’s Soul, the lone genre nominee in the Best Movie category, remained sidelined as To All the Boys: Always and Forever won out.

The show snapped to a stop long enough to honor a pair of other Marvel icons. The late Chadwick Boseman earned a posthumous award for Best Performance in a Movie for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom; while Scarlett Johansson was presented with this year’s Generation Award for her full-career body of work. Johansson tapped the occasion to introduce an all-new trailer for Black Widow, which is spying a July 9 release date in theaters and at Disney+.

The MTV Movie & TV Awards are set to get real once again Monday evening, when a separate ceremony will honor all the past year’s reality-TV and documentary highlights at the MTV Movie & TV Awards: Unscripted. Tune in when the live event fires up at MTV starting at 9 p.m. ET.