The Weirdly Refreshing Honesty of the Oscars of TikTok
For the longest time, I kept myself from joining TikTok. Social media, I figured, was already kind of a problem for me. I was heavily hooked on Instagram, reaching for my phone and clicking into the app as soon as I woke up in the morning, and then continuing to scroll my feed and swipe through stories and check my D.M.s many times through the day in a kind of fugue state, even though, rationally, I knew that seeing everyone else’s seemingly perfect, fulfilled, and happy lives often made me feel like shit about myself. X, too, was something of an issue. As a longtime tweeter, I kept doggedly logging into the app even after Elon Musk bought it, despite its proliferation of racist, pornographic, and conspiratorial posts. So strong was the hold that these platforms exerted on my time and habits that the only way for me to refrain from using them was to fully deactivate them, which I’d occasionally resort to doing. (If I simply deleted the apps from my phone, I would find myself—shamefacedly, self-loathingly—downloading them again almost immediately.) My brain, dependent on the instant gratification of likes and replies, reliant on the numbing comfort of scrolling and clicking, and terrified of the prospect of being alone with its own thoughts, was plenty full of poison without another social-media platform being added to the mix.
My trepidation about TikTok, it seemed, had some grounding in reality. Certainly, in the past several years, the app has been blamed for any number of contemporary social ills. It’s been variously associated with phone addiction, disinformation, and zombie-like hyper-superficiality. (In a recent episode of the new HBO comedy “I Love L.A.,” the real-life TikTok influencer Quenlin Blackwell spoofs herself as a shallow content creator obsessed with maximizing her empty TikTok fame.) The app, with its busy, nonsensical, and meme-heavy for-you feed, often soundtracked with harebrained audio effects and cartoonishly sped-up music snippets or narration, seems especially geared toward attracting young people, which has sparked worry about the platform’s potential negative impact on kids’ mental health. “When I started this project, one girl told me, half of my friends have an eating disorder from TikTok and the other half are lying,” the documentarian Lauren Greenfield said, when I spoke with her last year about “Social Studies,” her recent series about teens and social media.
Still, I knew that TikTok’s utter centrality to contemporary American life could not be denied. The number of TikTok users in the U.S., at last official count, was a mind-boggling hundred and seventy million, and TikTok Shop, the in-app online marketplace that launched in the States in the fall of 2023, has been growing in this country at a dizzying clip, already rivalling long-established online-commerce companies like Etsy and eBay. (Between January and October of this year, marketplace sales reached ten billion dollars in the States, compared with just half that sum during the same period in 2024—and this despite Donald Trump’s tariffs.) As a critic, I, too, realized that TikTok was a breeding ground not just for memes and trends that animate popular culture, like the senseless if oddly amusing “six seven” or the frankly disgusting Dubai chocolate, but also for celebrities who go on to surpass the confines of the platform. (Addison Rae, for instance, who rose to prominence, as a teen, performing in dance videos on the app, and then turned to a pop-singing career, was recently nominated for the Grammy for Best New Artist and selected as the Guardian’s artist of the year.) In short, I began to feel that I owed it to myself, my readers, and maybe even my nation, to take the plunge into the choppy waters of TikTok. And when the opportunity arose to attend the first-ever TikTok Awards ceremony, in Hollywood, I knew that the time was now.
To have some reinforcement on my maiden voyage, I invited my friend Hannah to join me. Though she’s an adult and even a parent, Hannah, whom you might know as a food critic for this publication, surprised me by confessing that she was “genuinely a huge fan” of TikTok, though she hastened to provide a caveat. “I think it’s awful and a scourge on the earth,” she said, adding that she’s lost endless precious hours to mindless scrolling on the app, and that she occasionally must disable it when she begins to hear its most popular sound clips echoing in her head, “A Beautiful Mind”-style. Still, she explained, she appreciates TikTok for the unfamiliar corners of human experience that it reveals to her. Unlike Instagram, which leads her to compare and despair with people she knows, TikTok “doesn’t make me hate myself,” she told me, brightly. She watches court footage from murder cases, or “get ready with me” videos made by moms of eight in the Midwest, or odd challenges like “the candy salad trauma dump,” in which people name a trauma they’ve experienced as they chuck Sour Patch Kids or Skittles into a bowl. “It’s all weird strangers who fascinate me,” she said.
A couple of days before the ceremony, I created a TikTok account in preparation and began to scroll it trepidatiously. Hannah had praised the platform’s algorithm as extremely sensitive to her preferences (“I find that it really takes care of me,” she told me), but I knew that it would take time for the app to recognize my innermost needs, whatever those even were. (Cats? Plastic surgery before-and-afters? Celebrity-gossip blind items?) And so what I got was a little of everything: a video sharing tips on how to “level up your femininity” (“wear perfume everywhere”; “treat your hair like gold”); a prank in which a guy tries to direct confused drivers to a “gay parking lot”; a recording of a 911 call reporting a double murder; a treacly “Christmastime in New York” video that looked like, and in fact was (I think?), A.I. I also kept in mind the words of my teen-age daughter, who gave me some begrudging but useful advice before I got on the plane to Los Angeles. “On Instagram, some people might still want to connect with people they know,” she said. “On TikTok, everyone is out for themselves, creating content.” In other words, I was not here to make friends.
I shouldn’t have worried. Heading into the Palladium, the venue on Sunset Boulevard where the event was taking place, we saw many of the nominees and some of the event’s presenters congregating near the press pit, and I realized that I was truly a stranger in a strange land. Who the hell were these people? The vibe felt a bit like that of a small-town prom: revellers were hobnobbing in sequinned evening wear, inventive jewelry, elaborately coiffed hairdos, and heavy makeup. Some—the class clowns?—were even in costume. A performer at the event named Mr. Fantasy (1.1 million followers), with a coal-black bobbed wig, Elton John sunglasses, and a modish pink suit, delivered Austin Powers-style sound bites in an exaggerated British accent on the step-and-repeat. (Later, I learned that he is rumored to be the alter ego of the “Riverdale” actor K. J. Apa.) Jools Lebron (2.3 million followers), a presenter known for her viral 2024 TikTok catchphrase “very demure, very mindful,” who was dressed in a low-cut sparkly gown, cooled herself off with a handheld fan; Chris Finck (1.8 million followers), a creator nominated for his skydiving videos, jumped up and down for the cameras, as if to take flight, while wearing his wingsuit gear.
