By any measure, booking Miley Cyrus to host the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards seemed like a certain coup. Two years ago, performing on the show, she ignited a thousand think pieces with her antics, and since then, she’s become perhaps our most unfiltered pop star, for better and often for worse. She is a reliable generator of controversy, and a reliable generator of memes.

On a youth-focused awards show that’s as effectively consumed on the big living-room picture box as in bite-size pictures and videos on Instagram, Vine, Twitter and Snapchat, Ms. Cyrus is a model host, as well as a harbinger of cultural collisions and distribution strategies yet to come.

And yet, by the end of the night, when Ms. Cyrus performed a new song about self-empowerment (and drugs), backed by the Flaming Lips and dancing drag queens, she wasn’t nearly the most memorable part of the evening’s ceremonies.

Instead, the 2015 V.M.A.s — which took place Sunday night at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles and were broadcast on MTV with a brief, necessary tape delay to handle the abundant cursing — were defined not by Ms. Cyrus’s stagy shock, but rather by eruptions of extreme sincerity, sometimes bursting out of situations that were clearly contrived, and sometimes not.

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V.M.A.s 2015: On the Red Carpet

CreditJason Merritt/Getty Images (left, center); Larry Busacca/Getty Images

That was the case with Kanye West, who won the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award — essentially a lifetime achievement trophy, and perhaps the only meaningful award of the night.

When he took the stage, he soaked in applause, standing silent for almost two full minutes. And then, for 10 minutes, he floated through an extemporaneous speech covering the importance of the artist’s opinion, the cynicism of MTV, the tears of Justin Timberlake when he lost at the 2007 Grammys, and jokingly announcing a 2020 presidential run. He neared an apology for having interrupted Taylor Swift’s V.M.A.s acceptance speech six years ago, but swerved away before landing there. He also talked about his speech preparation: “Yes, I rolled up a little something. I knocked the edge off.” (Weed was supposed to be Ms. Cyrus’s thing, no?)

Maybe no one had a better time than Mr. West did during this show: He danced exuberantly during the Weeknd’s flame-filled performance of “Can’t Feel My Face,” and he spent most of the night laughing with his wife, Kim Kardashian, at one point curling up into her like a nesting baby.

Wasn’t Ms. Cyrus supposed to be having all the fun? As a host, she was flamboyant and awkward, preening in loud, shimmering outfits that mirrored the psychedelia of the GIF-and-Instagram-influenced art that filled the show’s interstitial bits. And she poked fun at her reputation for extreme behavior, whether in jokes delivered on stage or in pretaped sketches.

Ms. Cyrus’s wackiness felt authentic, but her presence was unpolished, and at times she seemed to be caught off guard by the specifics of her responsibilities. At one point, she was reading off her hand. And near the end of the show, during a bit where she was covering herself with only a curtain — a nod to her often nude-adjacent Instagram photos — her left breast was briefly exposed, as much wardrobe resistance as wardrobe malfunction.

Old criticisms that Ms. Cyrus too easily puts on and takes off signifiers of blackness weren’t likely to be quelled by her outfit choices, which included dreadlocks in two different colors, nor by the moment she called Snoop Dogg “my real mammy,” a word with offensive connotations that she either didn’t know about or didn’t care to know about.

A few days before the show, Ms. Cyrus said some impolitic things about Nicki Minaj and race in an interview with The New York Times. Ms. Minaj won Best Hip Hop Video, and she closed her speech with a challenge to Ms. Cyrus, who she called “this bitch who had a lot to say about me last week in the press.”

Was it choreographed? A true expression of distaste? Somewhere in the zone in between, where squabbles are acted out in public and hugged out in private? It was tough to tell. After Ms. Minaj finished her harangue, she smiled softly, as if tossing a Wiffle ball. But Ms. Cyrus looked flustered and exasperated, and suggested her words had been manipulated. The camera panned back to Ms. Minaj, no longer smiling, who mouthed, “Don’t play with me, bitch.”

The uncertainty about their antagonism made for suspenseful TV, and on this show, which constitutes the peak of MTV’s annual reckoning with music, it was more compelling than almost all of the actual musical performances or awards. But on modern-day MTV, music qua music always takes a back seat to music qua celebrity vehicle, and this year’s show became an ouroboros of V.M.A. story lines, whether it was Miley vs. Nicki, Taylor vs. Nicki (which had erupted on Twitter a few weeks prior) or Taylor vs. Kanye.

This was a show where Justin Bieber breaking into tears after flying over the crowd in a pose that was part Jesus Christ, part Criss Angel, barely registered. And where extravagant performances by Demi Lovato, Pharrell Williams and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, the sort of numbers that are usually this show’s bread and butter, felt inessential against the louder narratives of celebrity tension.

Who was absolved amid this riot of disagreement? Why, Ms. Swift, of course. No one is more adept at salving wounds. On her current tour, she brings out other famous people to serve as backing props, but here she was the one in service of others.

There was the moment she arrived on stage during Ms. Minaj’s show-opening performance, healing, with what appeared to be genuine affection, the Twitter rift that took place a few weeks ago. (Or at a minimum, Ms. Minaj’s glare had shifted elsewhere.) And Ms. Swift presented Mr. West with his Video Vanguard Award, a moment of circle-closing from their awkward encounter in 2009. She even managed to sneak in a shout out to iTunes, furthering her anti-Spotify position.

She also won Video of the Year for “Bad Blood” and brought on stage many of the models and actresses who starred in it with her. She thanked Kendrick Lamar, who appeared on the song and in the video, for making her a better person. But “Bad Blood,” of course, is a video full of girl-posse unity for a song about animus between two pop stars. There, hiding in plain sight, the evening’s good girl had gotten in her punch.

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