Jennifer Lopez got emotional after receiving the Generation Award at the 2022 MTV Movie & TV Awards.- Lopez received the award for her over 30 years of acting in movies and TV shows.
Jennifer Lopez cried during her acceptance speech for the Generation Award at the 2022 MTV Movie & TV Awards on Sunday.
Lopez was honored at the Barker Hangar in Los Angeles for her 36-year acting career spanning from her first role in the 1986 film "My Little Girl" to the critically acclaimed 2019 movie "Hustlers" and on to the present.
Lopez began her speech by saying there was a "deeply true" part of herself in each of her characters.
"Since you cannot create truth unless you've really lived it, I have a different kind of list of 'thank-yous' tonight," Lopez said. "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. 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."
The actor and singer began to cry as she added: "I want to thank disappointment and failure for teaching me to be strong and my children for teaching me to love."
Lopez wiped her tears as she continued to thank her fans.
"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," Lopez said. "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."
Lopez also thanked her "ride or die" longtime manager Benny Medina, who she said believed in her since "the first time I played him a raggedy little demo of a song that I had wrote that day."
She ended her speech by addressing her fiancé, Ben Affleck, and her family. "Wait for me to have dinner," she said, "I'll be home by 7."
Lopez has been nominated six times for the MTV Movie & TV Awards and has won twice. In March, she was honored with an Icon Award at the 2022 iHeart Radio Music Awards.
In February, Lopez told Rolling Stone she felt that she had to fight for respect in Hollywood after not being honored for her acting and musical career for so long.
"I think I'm an underdog," she said. "I always feel like I was scrapping from the bottom. Always. I always felt like I wasn't the one that was supposed to be in the room."
She added: "And I always acted like, 'Yeah, I'm good. I'm fine. I'm OK.' But it hurts to not be included. I don't know if I will ever be. There is an inner circle, like, 'We are the great artists.' And then there's the pop artists."