A lot of you probably heard about this, or watched this (it just ended a few minutes ago as I type this).
The award show had good and bad aspects, but overall was kind of sloppy, and the backlash on Twitter and probably on other sites has been big.
This is definitely worth cataloguing and I think the article will be pretty interesting. There's a lot to be covered -- hopefully a recording of the live stream will remain up so that it can be front & center in the article.
I'm not sure I'll have time to work on it myself, so feel free to go ahead and make the article if you want. Here's some info you'll need to start off:
Background info:
The show was sponsored by KIA, created by YouTube and Spike Jonze, and hosted by Jason Schwartzman and a guy whose name is escaping me right now. During the show, the awards nominees who had received the most votes were announced and received each award.
Show synopsis:
The show took place from 5 PM to ~7:30 PM EST on November 3rd, 2013, and was streamed live on YouTube.
It started off with a preshow, during which several featured artists performed.
At 6, the main event in New York began, and alternated between handing out the awards and showing "live music videos," where featured artists performed live on stage. (I'm not sure if the idea was to record their performances so that the footage could later be made into music videos for each song, or if it was just to have the performances resemble music videos.)
Winners:
[Unknown Award] – Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
Best Response – Lindsey Stirling & Pentatonix – "Radioactive"
[Unknown Award] – Taylor Swift
Artist of the Year – Eminem
EDIT: Well how about that, I found the full list of winners. Here it is:
http://hollywoodlife.com/2013/11/03/yma-winners-list-youtube-music-awards-2013/
Nominees:
Artist of the Year – Eminem, Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry, Rihanna, One Direction
(these are very incomplete, I'm writing all this off the top of my head)
Online Backlash:
The awards show was criticized heavily on Twitter (and probably on other social media sites as well) for being awkward, disorganized, and boring. At times, even the hosts and the crowd seemed unhappy with the way the show was going.
Some notable things that were mentioned a lot in the backlash:
-For some reason, at one point during the show the hosts were each holding a baby while reading off and presenting an award to Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. While they were talking to the hosts, both babies began to cry. The hosts did their best to comfort the babies while keeping their composure and everyone did their best to laugh it off, but it was visibly very awkward.
-Taylor Swift won one of the awards, but she was not at the show, so two of her fans collected the award (presumably to send it to her after the show). A Taylor-Kanye "Imma Let You Finish…" joke was made as well.
-One of the award envelopes was hidden inside of one of five cakes that were brought out to the hosts for them to find. The hosts were reluctant to destroy five cakes, and attempted to cut them using previous award readout slips, but eventually had to just tear them up with their hands.
-At one point during the show, some people (who I think were part of one of the performances) were throwing multicolored sand around, and a lot of it got onto the hosts, who initially encouraged the fun. However, Schwartzman struggled to read the next award due to all the sand in the air, and people were continuing to throw sand as he struggled.
-Several microphones were faulty, causing parts of some performances to be very muffled or inaudible.
-At the end of the show, Schwartzman asked Spike Jonze if he wanted to make a concluding statement, at which point he smiled and said, "I think we're done."
The show was also criticized for mostly featuring artists famous outside of YouTube rather than true YouTube celebrities. There were notable exceptions however (such as Lindsey Stirling, who herself said after accepting her award that all of her fame came from YouTube, and she even learned to dance for her performances by watching and practicing from instructional videos on YouTube).
On the other hand, the show did have some good aspects that received praise:
-the performances themselves were well-done and entertaining, and Eminem in particular received a lot of praise
-the camera crew worked very well with improvising camera angles, and the impromptu nature of their work was evident a few times during the show when the feed cycled between several different cameramen's shots looking for the ideal one. Though this cycling was awkward in and of itself, it did convey to the viewers that the camera crew was improvising their shots, which led to the praise of their work.
Most of the show's flops and awkward moments were probably due to what seemed to be the very improvisational nature of the show. However, again, that very nature did have some uniquely good effects as well.
To see the Twitter backlash, search Twitter with the hashtag #YTMA.
For a more complete list of awards and nominees, there will no doubt be numerous articles on other sites about the event that should have complete lists.
For more complete info on the show in general, hopefully both the preshow and the show itself will have permanent recordings on YouTube which should be pretty easy to find.
To whoever decides to make the article, feel free to copy and paste material from this post, but be sure to format it correctly and proofread it to make sure the grammar in the article is good.
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