How Award Shows Work: which ones are rigged and which aren’t?
Trae Patton/NBC/Getty Images.
Time to let you in on a few of the industry’s secrets. Celebrities and award shows—how does that work? Well, we’re here to tell you. I made a video that goes along with this post and it shows a bunch of celebrities exposing how award shows can be rigged.
Watch that after you read this post to no longer be fooled by Hollywood.
It was highly requested to educate you guys on this after I kept talking about how Selena Gomez’s team wanted to buy her an AMA award and everyone was like “wait whaaa? Buy????” and then she won.
So here’s how award shows work. This doesn’t go for all award shows because not all award shows are rigged and not all awards can be bought. However, this is how the usual bunch are decided. I’m going to explain to the best of my ability and you guys can ask your questions!
A. The nomination process
The companies behind the award shows will nominate the stars based on what they’ve done that year. If an artist released music and it was a commercial success, they’ll be nominated. You don’t have to be #1 and 80x platinum to land a nomination. Different types of success depend differently on what kind of award show it is.
1. Success (minimum weigh in)
Nomination processes vary for the different award shows. MTV award shows for example (VMAs, AMAs, EMAs, etc.) nominate stars based on how successful they are. If you had a hit this year, chances are it will be nominated.
Reuters
2. A celebrity’s team
Many times, a celebrity’s team will get them a nomination if they’re not going to get one already. The people behind the award shows aren’t the only ones to decide who gets nominated.
On top of a nomination, a celebrity’s team can put a restriction or a condition. For example, Justin Bieber’s manager Scooter Braun uses Justin’s name and relevancy to boost up stars all the time. He uses him to get his other clients a slot because he’s JUSTIN BIEBER. Scooter is the type to talk to the producers of the show and creators and be like “Okay, I’ll get you Justin Bieber to perform if you get my other client, Tori Kelly, a slot.”
And that’s what happened at the 2015 VMAs.
Committee Awards
Awards that have a committee to choose the nominees, run a tad bit differently.
Here’s how the Grammy awards work.
There’s a special and very exclusive committee that chooses the nominees. The celebrities will submit their work if it’s eligible and the committee gets the last say. No, celebrities and their teams can not “buy” them the award or nomination and that’s what makes the Grammys so prestigious.
However, I am not saying that the committee hasn’t been biased in the past or hasn’t been tipped. BUT, in order to do that, you have to have some serious power in the industry and it could be the “dark side of the industry” where you can blackmail your way through it OR you can have connections with the committee.
Get in the commmitte’s good graces and you’ll be likely to get nominated. Although that isn’t always the case and it’s not that easy either.
If you piss off the committee, it won’t be likely that you will be nominated. At the same time, they want to show their best efforts to remain a respectable committee so, despite a lot of things, they can still nominate you.
If you are not in good standing with the general public, they won’t nominate you and if you’re used to getting nominations, then you won’t get as much.
Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for DIRECTV
A perfect example would be how Taylor Swift’s Reputation album didn’t get nominated as much as she thought she would. She did get nominated for Best Pop Vocal Album in 2019, but it wasn’t the usual Taylor-Grammys-dump that she was accustomed to. Although she was nominated, she didn’t win and this brings us to our next point.
B. The Winners
For 90% of all award shows, the nominees know if they won or lost. It is usually sent in an email whether they won or not and the email will also sometimes include a celebratory speech. The email can be sent days/weeks in advance. The winners are based on many different things.
1. The awards can be bought most of the time
Here’s how this works. A celebrity’s team can buy the award for them. Think of it as a bidding war. Whoever bids the highest, gets the award. Now sometimes it doesn’t work out that way and there are many other factors.
2. You win the award depending on how much you need it
Some winners are chosen because they are the underdog and their team was able to buy them the award based on that.
The award that Fifth Harmony won at the 2014 VMAs; Artist to Watch, was bought; just like all VMA awards are.
Fifth Harmony’s team bought them this award in order to promote the up and coming group. 5 Seconds of Summer was also nominated in this category but 5SOS was already an established group by 2014. They had platinum singles and a #1 album. Fifth Harmony did not. Fifth Harmony needed the award more therefore they got it.
Winning an award on TV where millions are watching IS a form of promotion.
3. Winners are chosen based on attendance
Most of the time, the winners are going to be celebrities in attendance because imagine if for every category, the winner was not present? Notice how that rarely happens? And if it does happen, the category most likely won’t be broadcasted. It’s usually announced at the end of the show in a small message or something. Justin won like 6 AMAs in 2016, but he wasn’t present therefore the award was not broadcasted.
Of course there will be times where the celebrity pre-records a video as their acceptance speech. Does that ring a bell to anyone? Like hello? They pre-record their speech because they were told a while ago that they were winning!
Here’s a couple of celebrities (even though the list can be endless) that had pre-recorded acceptance speeches:
5 Seconds of Summer - Teen Choice Awards 2014
Justin Bieber - Juno Awards 2016
One Direction - Teen Choice Awards 2014
Selena Gomez - Much Music Video Awards 2014
You get the point.
Artists are told in advance that they’re winning since they weren’t going to be present at the show, so they already had a pre-recorded acceptance speech.
Also, that happens rarely. Usually, most winners are present if the award is going to be aired.
At the 2016 AMAs, Selena was nominated for Best Pop/Rock female artist alongside Adele and Rihanna. However, they were not present therefore the award was given to Selena.
And even if they were present, the award was still going to be given to Selena because that was her first appearance after her rehab stunt so her team was planning on making a big deal about it as I’ve already told you all before.
The speech. The almost breaking down. Everything is planned.
Twenty One Pilots were told in an email what awards they were winning at the 2016 AMAs and what awards they were losing.
They exposed that in an interview and said that at the end of the email, they tell them not to repeat this information to anyone. While exposing the AMAs, their team tries to stop them from talking towards the end. I linked the video above so check it out!
4. Winners are chosen if they are performers
A lot of the time, you’ll see that the performers are also winners. There have been many times where a celebrity performs and then accepts the award with the performance. Either before or after the performance.
An example is when Little Mix performed at the Teen Choice Awards in 2015.
It was an excellent performance btw.
Anyways, they accepted their award directly after. They also knew they were winning.
You think Little Mix were going to fly all the way from the UK to attend the Teen Choice Awards if they weren’t going to win?
Teen Choice Awards are known to be rigged. Many celebrities already exposed that.
The reason why performers are usually winners is because like I stated earlier, winning is a form of promotion. Award shows are a form of promotion.
5. Winners are chosen because they rightfully got the most votes
Ah. The rarest category.
Sometimes, awards have a counter or some sort of statistics to show you who’s in the lead. Usually, not all of the time, but usually those awards are determined fairly because hello??? The results are right there!
However, even then there are times when the artist was in 4th place and they ended up winning the award. It happened recently I think, but I don’t remember what award it was for or who won.
The winner then is determined the way I just explained so far.
Sometimes, your votes aren’t completely useless but they’re not that important.
C. So why do they make us vote if they already chose the winner?
Well I thought this was obvious but apparently not.
When you vote on an award show’s website, you are giving them traffic. The more people visit a website, the more money they make. By continuously clicking “vote vote vote” you are garnering traffic.
By tweeting a hashtag, you are garnering promotion and hype for the show. The whole point of tweeting the hashtag or voting in general is because the fans are promoting the website and the show for FREE.
Remember the murder of Christina Grimmie? She was shot at a meet & greet by a crazed man.
RIP, beautiful.
The Teen Choice Awards used that to their advantage and USED her death for attention and retweets.
Guess what? At the 2016 TCAs, not only was her category NOT aired (she won btw), but they did a segment on gun violence and did not even mention her!
They used her.
Anyways so that’s all of the factors I can think of that go into the nomination and winning process of award shows. You shouldn’t be too shocked that awards are rigged. Now if you’re still in disbelief or if you want more proof of this or if you just want some tea, watch our short video on celebrities who exposed award shows.
Comment down below any questions or thoughts you have! You can comment anonymously so take advantage of that. We will be reading and replying!