Jennifer Lopez took the stage at the MTV Movie & TV Awards on Sunday night to accept the Generation Award, and she thanked everyone who helped her along the way — including some whose intentions were the opposite.
After the show played a montage of some of Lopez’s most famous performances, the multi-hyphenate began her speech with some reflections on her career.
“You know, I look at those movies and I see all the wonderful people that I’ve been blessed to know and to work with. You’re only as good as the people that you work with. And if you’re lucky, they make you better. And I have been very lucky in that regard,” Lopez said. “As an actor, I’m not any of the women that I’ve played, but there’s a part of what is deeply true to me in each one of those characters. And since you cannot create truth unless you really lived it, I have a different kind of list of thank yous tonight.”
Lopez got emotional thanking not only the people who have been a part of her life in all the good ways but also those who discouraged her from the crafts in which she has excelled.
“I want to thank all the people who gave me this life; 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,” she continued. “I want to thank true love, and I want to thank the way that I lied to myself because that’s how I knew that I had to grow. I want to thank disappointment and failure for teaching me to be strong, and my children for teaching me to love.
“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 have done it without you. And I know I couldn’t have done it without the fans who saw the movies,” she continued to loud cheers from the audience.
As Lopez wrapped her speech, she turned her attention to her longtime manager Benny Medina, to praise him for being there all along and one of her biggest supporters.
“I want to thank Benny Medina. He doesn’t like me to talk about him. He likes to be in the background,” she said.
“But he’s more than just my manager. If there’s one person who believed in me from the beginning, and the first time I played him a raggedy little demo of a song that I had wrote that day — he never let me stop believing in myself — it was him,” she said.
Lopez praised Medina for being there when she was at low moments.
“And there were times so low, I think I kept going more for you than for myself because I love you,” she said praising him for being her true “ride or die.”
Before she left the stage, the superstar thanked MTV for its support over the years.
“Thank you for being such an amazing platform for all artists. Especially me over the years. I love you,” she said, telling her family at home to wait to have dinner, as she planned to be home by 7 p.m. PT.