Teen Choice Awards
The Teen Choice Awards were an annual awards show that aired on the Fox television network between 1999 and 2019. The awards honored the year's biggest achievements in music, film, sports, television, fashion, social media, and more, voted by viewers living in the United States, aged 13 and over, through various social media sites; primarily Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube.[1]
Teen Choice Awards
The awards show has been on an indefinite hiatus since the 2019 edition.
History[edit]
Executive producers, Bob Bain and Michael Burg, came together to create an award show geared toward a teen demographic, somewhat older than that of the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards, but similar to that of MTV. The format of the show has remained the same over the years, awarding the achievements of those in the entertainment and athletic industries with non-traditional categories fixed into the ceremony.
Ballots were once used in teen-oriented magazines, where readers were to purchase and tear out their ballot. Votes could also be cast online through Fox.com. In 2008, Fox and the show's producers created Teenchoiceawards.com as the official website for the Teen Choice Awards. In 2009, the number of votes cast was in excess of 83 million. Votes are now cast online through Twitter, FOX.com, and the FOX NOW app. In 2016, more than 37 million votes were cast.[2]
Since the ceremony's inception, the show has given out genuine custom-made surfboards to individual winners. The surfboard was chosen as the award because it represents the freedom of the summer vacation for teens.[3] In 2009, Hugh Jackman, upon winning his first one, said that he was no longer the only Australian without a surfboard.[4]
Controversy[edit]
On August 11, 2014, after losing his category, Vine star Cameron Dallas tweeted that the awards ceremony was "rigged", saying that he had been informed six days prior to the actual event that he had won the award, and the runners-up were told to still try to solicit votes from their followers, even though the results had already been decided. He also tweeted "So I found out that the Teen Choice Awards were rigged and used powerful internet people for marketing. I'm sad now. Television is stupid" before deleting the tweets, saying he "should have taken the high road", but he "didn't like the fact that [his fans] were being lied to".[14] Soon after Dallas' initial tweets, fellow Viner Carter Reynolds stated that the Teen Choice Awards had "used everyone for promotion", using the hashtag "#TeensDontHaveAChoiceAwards", which soon began trending by fans who noticed the disclaimer at the end of the show saying that the producers reserved the right to choose the winners.[15]
In earlier years of the show, the voting rules page[16] stated "Teenasaurus Rox reserves the right to choose the winner from the top four vote generators".[17]
In 2016, controversy started on Twitter when fans became upset when they found out that late pop singer Christina Grimmie won the award for Choice Web Star: Music but was not mentioned during the show. Many fans felt that the award show should have been dedicated to her memory or at least for a moment of recognition.[18]