In case you haven't heard, the winners of the 2012 BET Awards were unveiled last night, with categories in both music and film as always.

And since we care more about the film categories here on S&A, we'll focus on those alone. I'm sure you can find the full list of all nominees and winners with a quick Google search.

Samuel L. Jackson hosted the July 1 awards ceremony, held at Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium, as black Hollywood showed its wares down the red carpet, prepped and primed to give and/or receive. It was a night of music, movies, laughter, with an unexpected occurrence or two, all while Twitter feeds exploded with commentary from viewers, ranging from abhorrent to awesome.

Did you tune in? Do you care? Was it too big to miss (that was this year's tagline)?

Last year's awards show drew 7.7 million viewers; I haven't seen what this year's numbers were for last night; but I'm sure they'll turn up soon enough, and I'll update this post when that happens. I'd guess that it was probably more than last year's figures, thanks in part fo the expected Whitney Houston tribute.

But as always, everyone had an opinion as to who should've been nominated or who should've won over the others, etc, etc, etc… although, unlike last year, there was no real audience backlash this year; 

This year, eyebrows were raised when Kevin Hart was awarded the Best Actor trophy over the likes of Don Cheadle, Idris Elba, and Denzel Washington.

In the Best Actress category on the other hand, Viola Davis' win pleased most. 

And finally, in the Best Movie category, The Help picked up the trophy, over Good Deeds, Jumping The Broom, Laugh At My Pain, and Red Tails.

The backlash last year was quite overwhelming that BET chose to eventually formally respond; and they did so via Stephen Hill, President of Music Programming and Specials, and the executive producer of the BET Awards.

And I think maybe the most important thing Hill revealed that many would like to know is, how exactly the nominees are chosen each year:

"We assembled the [Voting] Academy. We try to make it as varied as possible. But when the Academy comes back with their results—again, it’s not any of our individual shows—that’s the decision we’ve made, to trust the Academy. When they come back with a decision, we stick by that decision… I want to be very clear. It’s not like, “Oh, we like four of them but we wanna stick Chris Brown in as an actor.” That’s who they voted for. Between music industry folk, bloggers, writers and fans, Chris Brown was nominated for an acting award [last year]… Like every time, there’s a collection of music industry folks, bloggers, music writers and, most importantly, a collection of fans that were gleaned from BET.com. We call it the Voting Academy."

So there ya go, if you've ever wondered…

See the full list of winners HERE.