Photo of multiple Teen Choice Awards
The Teen Choice Awards is an annual awards show that airs on the Fox network. The awards honor the year's biggest achievements in music, movies, sports, television, fashion, and more, voted by teen viewers (ages 13 to 19). Winners receive a full size surfboard designed with the graphics of that year's show.
History[]
Background[]
As the 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. Greg Sills has been the supervising producer and Paul Flattery has been the producer every year since its inception in 1999.
The format of the show has remained the same, awarding the achievements of those in the entertainment and athletic industries with non-traditional categories fixed into the ceremony. The show was held at the Barker Hangar at Santa Monica Airport for its first two shows in 1999 and 2000. However, since 2001, it has been held at the Gibson Amphitheatre in Universal City, California. Some years it airs live, but usually it airs on a one-day delay. With the demolition of the amphitheater in 2013, the show moved to a new location. Then after the remodeled Pauley Pavilion at UCLA in Westwood, Los Angeles was flooded by a broken 30" water pipe on July 29, 2014, the show was moved to the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.
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. That same year "teenchoicegirl" appeared on Twitter. She is actually a teenage girl working on the show as an intern and keeps fans informed of news and gossip. In just a few weeks she had over 28,000 followers.
Since the ceremony's inception, the show has given out genuine custom-made surfboards to individual winners (they cost over $800 each to manufacture). They create a new original design every year. The surfboard was chosen as the award because it represents the freedom of the summer vacation for teens, whether they surf or not. Some celebrities, such as Jennifer Love Hewitt, have actually used them to surf; Marlon Wayans famously said, "Brothers don't surf"; and in 2009, Hugh Jackman, upon winning his first one, said that he was no longer the only Australian without a surfboard.
Controversy and allegations of rigging[]
On August 11, 2014, 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". 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, asking what was the point of voting if their votes were ultimately worthless. Reynolds also later deleted his tweet. Fans of One Direction also noticed that the band's clothes while accepting the award for "Choice Music Group" were the same as the ones they were wearing to the launch of their fragrance in New York on August 5, despite this being before the votes officially ended (the original closing time for voting was August 10 at 11:59 p.m).
The voting rules page states "Teenasaurus Rox reserves the right to choose the winner from the top four vote generators".