The most interesting takeaway of tonight’s MTV Movie Awards wasn’t necessarily that “The Avengers” predictably scooped up the prize for Movie of the Year. (Though, I say predictably, but I’m clearly garbage at guessing these things.) No, more interesting was that the MTV crowd gobbled up David O. Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook” with a spoon, handing the film three awards of its own on the evening. Add that to its awards season tally and eight Oscar nominations and you’re talking about one wide-ranging crossover hit. A pity, then, that star Jennifer Lawrence wasn’t on hand to share in the spoils (and pick up her own pair of popcorn trophies).

Indeed, the reason one of the evening’s biggest categories (and even a sketch) wasn’t televised is because Lawrence, who won the Best Actress Oscar in February, wasn’t in attendance. She won Best Female Performance and Best Kiss (with Bradley Cooper), but MTV only bothered to air the latter out of those rather than deal with having someone accept on her behalf, I guess. Also not televised were Best Scared-as-S**t Performance (which Lawrence DIDN’T win — it went instead, happily, to “Life of Pi” star Suraj Sharma) and Best On-Screen Duo.

Nevertheless, the point here is that the film went over huge with the demographic, perhaps surprisingly so. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves; “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2” did come away with the only prize for which it was nominated: Best Shirtless Performance. All the Twihards were busy with their big protest social networking screening of the film, so they probably didn’t even get to see Taylor Lautner accept. More on that in tonight’s Best and Worst post, though.

This stuff is endlessly fascinating to me. I can’t quite explain why. Producers and executives decide on the nominees and the winners are decided by popular vote, and the resulting mixture is some odd, weirdly representative amalgamation of pop culture in the form of a time capsule. The drama surrounding the “Twilight” crowd, for instance, is just bizarre and intriguing; they even “protested” the social media vote for Best Hero, yielding the Bilbo Baggins win rather than Kristen Stewart’s Snow White.

Or maybe it’s simply a nice reprieve from the self-serious days of Oscar season. Hey, I’ll take that.

More later tonight. For now, check out the full list of MTV Movie Awards winners here and Dan Fienberg’s live-blog of the show here.