The NightMoves Awards are back for a 34th year, and the nominee announcements started rolling out this week. For an industry where most awards programs come and go, longevity is its own kind of news, and NightMoves has run continuously since NightMoves magazine founded it in 1993. That makes it one of the oldest fan-voted honors the business has.
The 2026 ceremony is set for Sunday, October 11, at The Stockyard in Holiday, Florida, keeping the show in its traditional Tampa Bay home. Online fan voting opened at midnight on July 15 and was still running as the nominations went public in the final week of July.
The fan-vote model is the distinction
Plenty of adult-industry awards are decided by panels and juries. NightMoves built its reputation on the opposite, letting fans do the voting, which changes what winning means. A juried award certifies craft. A fan award certifies audience, and for performers and studios those are two different currencies worth having.
That difference showed up in how this week’s nominees reacted. Director and performer Jim Powers picked up four nominations, reported by XBIZ on July 30, including Best Non-Feature Director, Best Trans Release, and Best MILF Release. He tied his response to the award’s age. “The NightMoves Awards have been around as long as I have,” Powers said. “Thanks for the recognition. It means a lot.”
Performer Kasey Kei earned her first NightMoves nomination the same day, in the Best Transsexual Performer category, and pointed the credit at the voters. “What an honor to be nominated with such an incredible bunch of women,” she said. “A big thank you to everyone at NightMoves. And of course, thank you to my fans who have voted for me.”
Why the awards calendar matters as business
Awards look like ceremony and sound like marketing, and they are both, but underneath they are infrastructure. A recognizable, decades-old awards program gives the industry a shared calendar, a reason for people to gather, and a credential performers can put on a profile and studios can put on a release.
The nominee rollout was still in progress through July 30, with individual announcements published serially rather than as one master ballot, so the full category and nominee count is not yet clear from the coverage. What is clear is the shape of it. An awards show entering its 34th year, with fan voting already live months ahead of the ceremony, is a marker of an industry that has built lasting institutions around itself. Those institutions are easy to overlook next to the churn of platform and legal news, and they are part of what keeps the business a business.
