YouTube's live, unscripted music awards show falls short

Crying babies, a faked double suicide, and a makeup-free Lady Gaga performing in plaid and a trucker's cap: There were all kinds of unexpected moments during the unscripted, inaugural YouTube Music Awards.

Actress Greta Gerwig kicked the awards off as the protagonist of a live video of Arcade Fire's "Afterlife." Gerwig appears to break up with her boyfriend, then expresses the emotions she's feeling in an interpretive dance that moves from apartment to forest to soundstage, with a little visual trickery.

"This is all about anything happening," Jason Schwartzman, who co-hosted the Spike Jonze-directed event with comedian Reggie Watts, said during the live webcast from New York.

Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler stepped into the shot to take photos with his iPhone. The show's hosts ran through the crowd a few times, climbed a ladder, participated in face-painting, performed not one but two improvised songs and in the show's most awkward moment carried babies through the crowd and tried to interview Macklemore and Lewis as they cried.

Swedish DJ and music producer Avicii played the dumb, hot guy part in a short film that concluded with a blood-spattered faked double suicide.

The unscripted event was chock full of surprises like those, some not so well received by critics.

"Scripts, it turns out, were invented for a reason," read a not-so-glowing review by the Los Angeles Times' Jessica Gelt.

USA Today's Hilary Hughes was also less than enthused by the YouTube show's off-the-cuff antics, saying that the much-anticipated event failed to live up to its promise of producing what Jonze said would be a mess that resembles a real YouTube video but "hopefully in the best way."

"The YouTube Music Awards sought to redefine expectations for a celebration of popular music, and instead fell short of revolutionizing them," Hughes wrote.

Still, some reviewers were delighted by the award show's quirkiness. Billboard called the show "gleefully messy."

Eminem, Taylor Swift and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis were among the top winners Sunday night.

Eminem was named artist of the year before performing a word-perfect version of his new lung-busting tour de force "Rap God," filmed in black and white. Swift's "I Knew You Were Trouble" won YouTube phenomenon and Macklemore and Lewis won YouTube breakthrough.

Other winners included Girls' Generation, DeStorm and Lindsey Stirling and Pentatonix.

Al Jazeera and The Associated Press