Pornstar awards & nominations

The AVN Awards have been handed out by the trade magazine Adult Video News since February 1984. The Oscars-of-porn label mostly fits: a January ceremony in Las Vegas, more than a hundred categories, and a trophy that follows a performer for the rest of her career. The show runs inside the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo. Even a nomination here is the single most-cited credit in the business, which is why it shows up on so many of the profiles below.

The X-Rated Critics Organization set up its own show after a disputed result at the 1984 AFAA awards, and handed out the first trophies on Valentine's Day 1985. What makes it different is who votes: only XRCO members, and they are asked to skip the categories they do not feel qualified to judge. The ceremony sits in Los Angeles in the spring. The trophy was a wooden heart until 2014, which is where the old "Heart-On Awards" name came from. Categories here are blunter than at the other shows, Superslut and Unsung Siren among them, and several exist nowhere else.

XBIZ started its awards in 2003 as the trade-side counterpart to the fan-driven shows. Run out of Los Angeles by Adnet Media, the ceremony lands in January, usually around the Hollywood Palladium, and weighs studios, directors and the commercial end as heavily as on-camera work. From 2025 the show was rebranded the XMAs.

This is XBIZ's second show, the European one, and it has changed names twice: XBIZ Europa Awards through 2024, Euro XMAs in 2025, XMA Europe in 2026. The city has not moved. It is Amsterdam every September, run as the closing night of XBIZ's week of events there, and Fansly presents it. The card looks different from the Las Vegas shows. Dorcel alone holds 12 of the 40 movie nominations in 2026, and Private, Evil Angel (much of it Rocco Siffredi's), Sinful XXX and Little Caprice Dreams take most of what is left. Sixteen of the 62 categories go to streamers and clip creators rather than studio productions, which is the other thing that sets this show apart. The 2026 edition has 980 nominees, voted on by industry members at XBIZ.net.

The Inked Awards started in 2012 for a corner of the industry the bigger shows tend to skip: tattooed performers and the people who build their careers around ink. The first few years ran online; it became a live event in 2015, with fan-voted categories added along the way.

The Venus Award has been handed out in Berlin since 1997 as part of Venus Berlin, the erotic trade fair on the Funkturm exhibition grounds every October. Around 30 categories, and the structure is unusual: performers compete inside their own country first (Germany, France, the United States and so on) while the same entries stay eligible for the European and International categories. That is why a German amateur star and an American headliner can both leave with a trophy. Between 2005 and 2009 the fair ran the Eroticline Awards instead; the Venus name came back in 2010.

VOD here is the video-on-demand strand tied to AVN: scenes released straight to video-on-demand became eligible in a handful of scene categories without going through a disc release first. The entries we hold under this label came through our source without a ceremony year attached, so they sit on the board page rather than under a year.