The AVN Awards are movie awards sponsored and presented by the American adult video industry trade magazine AVN (Adult Video News) to honor exceptional performance in various aspects of the creation and marketing of American pornographic movies. They are called the "Oscars of porn". The AVN Awards are divided into nearly 100 categories, some of which are analogous to industry awards offered in other film and video genres, and others that are specific to pornographic/erotic film and video.

AVN sponsored the first AVN Awards ceremony in February 1984. The award ceremony occurs in early January during the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Since 2008, the ceremony has aired in a form edited for time on Showtime, which is usually broadcast in a 90-minute timeslot.

Awards for gay adult video were a part of the AVN awards from the 1986 ceremony through the 1998 ceremony. The increasing number of categories made the show unwieldy and for the 1999 ceremony AVN Magazine began hosting the GayVN Awards, an annual adult movie award event for gay adult video.

Not to be confused with pornographic actress Sunny Lane.

Sunny Leone (born May 13, 1981) is an Indo-Canadian pornographic actress, actress, businesswoman and model of dual Canadian/American nationality. She was named Penthouse Pet of the Year in 2003 and was a contract star for Vivid Entertainment. Named by Maxim as one of the 12 top porn stars in 2010, she has also played roles in independent mainstream films and television shows.

Leone was born in Sarnia, Ontario to Sikh Punjabi parents from India. Her father was born in Tibet and raised in Delhi, while her mother (who died in 2008) was from a small town named Nahan in Sirmaur, Himachal Pradesh. As a young girl, she was very athletic and played street hockey with the boys, enjoyed ice skating on a nearby frozen lake and drinking hot chocolate in front of a fire after playing in the snow all day.

Though she was raised as a Sikh, her parents enrolled her in a Catholic school, as it was felt to be unsafe for her to go to public school. There she had her first kiss at 11, lost her virginity to a basketball player at another school at 16, and discovered that she was bisexual at 18. When she was 13, her family moved to Fort Gratiot, Michigan, then to Lake Forest, California a year later, fulfilling her grandparents' dream that the family be together in one place. She graduated from high school in 1999 and enrolled in college.

Nina Hartley (born Marie Louise Hartman; March 11, 1959) is an American pornographic actress, pornographic film director, sex educator, feminist, and author.

Hartley was born in Berkeley, California to a Lutheran father and a Jewish mother whose family was from Alabama. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the youngest of four children, with an older sister and two older brothers. Her parents converted to Buddhism when she was young. After graduating from high school in 1977, she attended San Francisco State University's undergraduate nursing school and graduated magna cum laude in 1985. She is a registered nurse.

In 1982, during her sophomore year of nursing school, she started working as a stripper at Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theater. She made her foray into the world of pornographic movies during her junior year, in 1984. Her debut performance was in the film Educating Nina, which was produced and directed by the veteran porn star Juliet Anderson (better known as "Aunt Peg"), and this proved to be a massive hit.