Teen Choice Awards: 5 things you missed
Emotional Jonas Brothers got ample airtime, Jeong called out YouTube stars
Twenty years after its start, the Teen Choice Awards are still going strong — the annual Fox spectacle has been around since 1999, when the first performers were ’N Sync, Gloria Estefan, Britney Spears and what one newspaper hilariously called “Blind 1982.”
Anyway, the two-hour telecast Sunday night featured A-listers, YouTubers and A-list YouTubers, along with quite a few stars who hover somewhere in between. Avengers: Endgame, Aladdin, Riverdale and K-pop supergroup BTS tied for four wins each. And as usual, there was some drama.
Here are some highlights from the show:
1 The show was basically dedicated to the Jonas Brothers.
The JoBros are back, if you somehow missed that fact, and they received an extraordinary amount of airtime. The sibling trio of Joe, Kevin and Nick received the decade award, and leading up to the trophy/surfboard presentation, they appeared in emotional pre-taped segments to talk about their journey, including how they broke up (“Family’s complicated”), and got back together this year for a new album, Happiness Begins.
2 Blanco Brown was declared “single-handedly responsible for the song of the summer that sparked a worldwide dance craze.”
Definitely stating the song of the summer can be controversial. But the Teen Choice Awards weren’t afraid to make the declaration as Blanco Brown performed The Git Up, the country-trap earworm that has been steadily climbing the Billboard Hot 100 and has been at the top of the Hot Country Songs chart for a month.
3 Monsta X made its U.S. award show debut.
The popular K-pop group ended its first U.S. arena tour in Los Angeles on Saturday and then headed down to Hermosa Beach to perform at the Television Critics Association awards — much to the delight of its fans, who kept the group trending in the days leading up to the TCAs.
4 Taylor Swift urged equal pay for the U.S. women’s national soccer team.
World Cup champion Alex Morgan presented the newly created icon award to Taylor Swift, and the singer used the first minute of her acceptance speech to put the focus on the team’s much-discussed gender-discrimination lawsuit.
“While they were winning the World Cup, they were also taking a historic stand in terms of gender equality, gender pay gaps. Please, please, please support her and her teammates because this is not over yet,” Swift said. “Get online, talk about it, let people know how you feel about it, because what happened to them is unfair. It’s happening everywhere, and they are heroes and icons for standing up.” 5
Ken Jeong may now be in a feud with YouTuber Tana Mongeau.
Ken Jeong first appeared to accept the choice movie comedy prize on behalf of his Crazy Rich Asians co-stars. “Representation matters! Diversity is what makes America great,” he told the cheering audience. “It is important for us to see people who look like us onscreen.”
Then, because it wouldn’t be the Teen Choice Awards without some minor drama, he segued into a bit to promote The Masked Singer (on which he’s a judge) and pretended to reveal that YouTube star Jake Paul was under one of the masks. “That could stress out his pretend marriage, leading to a fake divorce from his not-wife. Kids, am I right? Tana Mongeau?” Jeong asked.
The teens in the crowd were visibly not amused with this reference to the wedding spectacle between Paul and Mongeau, who are indeed not legally married.