The Spike TV Scream Awards

 

Over the weekend I was lucky enough to have found a way to weasel my way into attendence of the Spike TV Scream Awards.  For those of you unfamiliar with the Scream Awards, they're an awards show put on by Spike TV and they focuse solely on giving out awards to horror films, scifi films, action films and comic books.  Think of the show like the MTV Movie Awards, only without the inherent lameness that comes with being a product of MTV.  I wish I could say that I have a ton of cool photos to share with you, but as I'm not cool enough yet to have a press pass, I was banned from having a camera and thus only have one or two hastily snapped cell phone shots that I'll post later today.

 

I'd never been to an awards show before so I had no idea what to expect, but wow did I have a really good time.  Typically, I'm not much of a celebrity stalker kind of person.  I'm not one to usually get all happy and excited to see celebrities, but I must admit to getting sort of giddy once the show got going due to the sheer caliber of people I found myself around.

 

The pre-show stuff was fairly slow.  Agonizingly slow to be honest.  The way it was set up, the general audience that I was a part of were put in these bleachers above the red carpet, on the opposite side of the press that were taking pictures of the celebrities.  When I say "above the red carpet" I mean that literally.  The bleachers were raised up about eight feet or so from the ground, so we were literally looking down on people as they walked by.  This created a big problem though for anyone who wasn't in the very front row, as now all you could see what the person in front of you.  If you weren't in the very front, you didn't get to see much.  And even if you made it to the front, all you got to see was the back side of a lot of heads since we were across from the press.

 

All this meant that for the most part, the red carpet bit for me was pretty lame.  Other than learning that Billy Corgan has an acne problem on the back of his head, not a lot of fun stuff happened during the red carpet, with one notable exception.  Actor Greg Grunberg, the guy who plays Matt Parkman on Heroes, was hosting the red carpet stuff for Spike TV and early into the show he came into the audience, right where my friends and I were standing, and started interviewing us and asking us what kinds of movies or comics we liked.  He was a really nice guy and was very funny to talk to, although I was amused to see how much makeup he had on to be on TV.  But that's show business I guess.

 

While I myself wasn't able to take photos of the red carpet stuff, I did find this flickr account which gives you an idea of what it looked like.  I was in the raised bleachers in the background of most of these shots.

 

After a while I did finally manage to make my way to the front of the bleachers and was able to see a bunch of celebrities including people like: Ron Pearlman, Julie Benz, Wes Craven, Stan Lee, Jaime King, Summer Glau and Milla Jovovich.  Oh my god Milla and Summer are so hot in person.  Sorry, just had to say that.

 

Once we got inside, the show began with Kate Beckinsale came out and gave a Scream Icon Award to none other than Sir Anthony Hopkins.  I definitely did not expect someone as awesome as Anthony Hopkins to be there, so for the show to start out on that note was pretty damned cool.  After that the show got going.  I'm not going to bore you with all of the details.  I'm sure you've see awards shows before, so you know how they work, but here's some rather cool highlights of the night:

 

• They world premiered the trailer for the brand new Remake of Friday the 13th.


• Some new Watchmen movie footage was shown.


• Tim Burton almost had a panic attack during his grand entrance to the show.


• Robert Downey Jr. gave a hilarious pre-recorded acceptance speech from the set of Sherlock Holmes in London.


• The Smashing Pumpkins performed a song live on-stage.

 

Up on Spike TV's website right now they have some highlights of the show up, including the Tim Burton Incident and Robert Downey Jr's speech.  Trust me when I say that Tim Burton's entrance was nowhere near as smooth as it looks in the edited video.  It took almost 10 minutes to get him from the back of the ampitheater to the stage, and he was visibly not happy about being up there so long.  The bucket that had him in was rickety and it looked like he was going to fall out at any second.  He looked scared up there.

 

By far though, the highlight of the evening for me was getting to see George Lucas in person.  He comes out at the very end of the show to accept the Comic Book Icon award from Samuel L. Jackson.  I've never seen George Lucas before and I never thought I would.  So to be suprised by his appearance that evening was amazing.  By the time he came out I had been lucky enough to be granted a seat near the front of the stage, so I was only about 10 feet from him.  It was pretty damned cool.  I managed to get a cell phone pic of him from where I was which I will post later today.

 

The Scream Awards show airs tomorrow night at 9pm on Spike TV.  To help you remember that, here's a countdown thing: