As opposed to all those narrow-minded award shows, keen to celebrate just one thing at a time for the sake of everyone’s sanity, the annual People’s Choice Awards aims to celebrate all that’s good and great about popular culture. So rather than just focusing on music or film or TV, it covers music and film and TV. Oh, and the slightly more nebulous “digital”, which features Beyoncé fighting it out with The Rock for favourite social media celebrity, and Cara Delevingne and Kylie Jenner scrapping over the DailyMail.com seriously popular award. Seriously.

In total there are a butt-numbing 65 awards, all voted for by the public and only broken up by host Jane Lynch’s heavily signposted comedy, an array of guest presenters (including Carly Rae Jepsen, The Big Bang Theory’s Mayim Bialik and Lady Gaga’s fiancé, Taylor Kinney) and just two musical performers. One of those is the never intentionally hilarious Jason Derulo, who according to a backstage interview is currently “on a quest to bring the art of performance and dance back to live shows”. If you witnessed him dancing while perched on a hoverboard at the EMAs recently then you’ll know how seriously he takes that quest.

Going into the show we knew a handful of things for certain: that Ellen DeGeneres would walk off with the favourite humanitarian award (last year’s winner: Ben Affleck); that mopey Michael Jackson fan The Weeknd was the most nominated person with five nods; and that nothing will ever quash people’s enthusiasm for The Big Bang Theory (it’s been nominated for favourite TV comedy seven times, winning the past three years).

Here are seven other things we learned.

You don’t actually need to watch the show itself

Obviously – OBVIOUSLY – I watched it all, every single glistening toothy grin, but basically no one need bother. The official Twitter account basically has everything of note that happened embedded either as gifs or, in the case of Shawn Mendes’ performance and various other memorable moments, entire videos. There are even weird gif things that you can control by running your cursor backwards and forwards, which in the case of this one here makes Sharon Osbourne seem like she’s dancing (she’s actually kicking someone in the backside, but more on that later).

If you can’t be bothered to scroll through an entire newsfeed full of mentions of “squad goals” under pictures of two people standing next to each other, then CBS – the channel that airs the awards – have written an impressively boring rundown of exactly what happened in fairly ludicrous detail.

Britney Spears’ incredible social media talents have finally been recognised

Social media is both a blessing and a curse for today’s pop stars. It can very quickly expose an irritating personality (no names, obviously), highlight immaturity (again, my lips are sealed) or just bombard you with record company spam (literally any girl band ever). Despite her recent trials and tribulations, Britney Spears has somehow managed to carve out an interesting online presence, memorably taking down Iggy Azalea after a clash about promotional commitments for their appalling duet, Pretty Girls. But it’s her Instagram that presumably earned her the coveted favourite social media celebrity. Just recently there’s been a downcast selfie highlighting a small bruise that came from running into a pole; some truly terrible poorly photoshopped self-help art and – why not? – a picture of Albert Einstein. Unfortunately Britney couldn’t be there last night to pick up the award in person ... an announcement she made via Instagram, obviously.

Everyone loves Ellen

As well as winning the nation’s favourite humanitarian gong, Ellen DeGeneres also won favourite daytime TV host, giving her 17 awards in total since she was first nominated back in 1995. Perhaps highlighting why so many people love her, she concluded her first acceptance speech by putting a topless picture of Chris Hemsworth up on the big screens to an unsurprisingly ecstatic response.

Mind you, some are speculating that this stoic face was in some way a response to Jane Lynch’s, er, interesting opening performance of Walk the Moon’s Shut Up and Dance with Me.

The show’s producers have got their fingers on the comedy pulse

Not sure if you saw, but apparently something happened at the Miss Universe pageant the other week. Yes, a man called Steve Harvey read out the wrong name and instead of Miss Colombia getting the hat and the flowers, as he’d announced, the actual winner was Miss Philippines. So she got the hat and flowers instead. Obviously this is ripe for parody, especially as literally no one has already made endless jokes about it on Tumblr and Instagram and what have you. So last night host Jane Lynch – who, FYI, has a new show coming to CBS tonight, but she doesn’t like to mention it – presented an award to a man who accepted it but then Lynch realised she’d made a mistake and and took it off him and – wait for it – gave it to Miss Colombia. Do you see?

Sharon Osbourne still won’t tolerate idiots

Obviously Sharon Osbourne’s greatest moment thus far is when she threw a glass of water over Louis Walsh during some argument over a hapless contestant on The X Factor. What this said loud and clear was that Sharon had very little patience for morons and that she’d use force to rid herself of them. Well, the impulse reared its head again last night. Onstage to accept an award with her co-hosts on The Talk, Osbourne and co were interrupted by a man apparently giving a shout-out to rapper Kevin Gates. While he was quoting Kanye West’s new song Facts (“Yeezy jumped over the Jumpman”) Osbourne proceeded to kick him twice in the backside, apparently shouting “get the fuck off my stage” before order was restored.

Vin Diesel gave a lovely speech

The People’s Choice Awards’ aim is to celebrate the things that, for one reason or another, don’t necessarily get celebrated elsewhere. Voted for by the fans, it’s a chance for the hugely populist films, shows and music to be honoured, and it means that often the winner’s speeches come across as a lot more genuine than thanking a faceless academy or some Twitter algorithm. Everyone also seems to be genuinely happy to be there, even young Keith Richards, AKA Johnny Depp. Accepting two awards for Furious 7, Vin Diesel gave a lovely speech thanking everyone (“real people”, as he calls them) for making the film so successful and for voting it Favorite Movie. At the end he even broke into song, crooning his way through a bit of Wiz Khalifa’s See You Again in honour of the late Paul Walker who died during filming.

Seriously though, The Big Bang Theory? Really?

The show about science and virgins scooped up three awards on the night: favourite TV show (ahead of Game of Thrones) and favourite network TV comedy (beating Modern Family), while 42-year-old student Jim Parsons won favourite comedic actor for his role as Sheldon Cooper. Next you’ll be telling me Grey’s Anatomy is still winning awards!

(It won favourite network TV drama.)