The geek gravitational pull on Saturday night brought me and others to Sam's Billiards, up the street from the Hollywood Theatre, for Aaron Duran and Scott Dally's first foray into awards showing. They'd put several categories up for an online vote: acting, screenwriting, directing, cinematography, special effects (presented by Clyde Lewis because he's been a special effect on film), and trailer. The crowd included people with T-shirts saying things like "W.A.S.P." and "You can't have MANSLAUGHTER without LAUGHTER" and "Yo, She-Bitch. Let's go." That meant Transformers and Grindhouse were major nominees alongside Sweeney Todd and There Will Be Blood, and that Fatboy Roberts got to use his "Machete trailer dude" voice ("Mach-ET-ee! He GETS the girl! He KILLS the bad guy!") when reading off the Best Trailer nominees.
Being down a pint of blood that night, I didn't imbibe beer. (I wanted to get drunk on fandom, yo.) Fatboy and Big Jim from The Marconi Show said that blood donating was one way to be an easy drunk. Yeah, but they weren't allowed to try that out on me. They let me in on behind-the-scenes radio stuff that I won't repeat (and no, the phrase "Disciplined? Naked? With a melon?" was NOT mentioned!), and I'm a media geek so I absorbed the info.
The trivia contest gave geeky question options: "The Two Bruces" (is this about Bruce Willis or Bruce Campbell?), "Name That Kill" (which Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street sequel had someone die THIS way?), "Film Fever Radio Lore," and "Trek or Lucas?" Fatboy either volunteered to be, or got roped into being, the back-up question-answering person, but some people forgot they had him and his powerful geek-fu as a lifeline (guess it's been too long since Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was popular). We in the audience chimed in, too. When one contestant thought the answer to a question about time travel was Star Wars, I yelled "There's no time travel in Star Wars!!! Star Trek is lousy with time travel stories!" (That's "lousy" as in "loaded," not as in "bad.") I rarely yell but yes, this stuff I consider worth yelling about.
Las Vegas musician The Low, the male half of the band Azure Noir, made it there to present an award; we lamented the lack of Seamus of Rick Emerson's show, but getting him from Colorado that time was not doable. Prizes included graphic novels, Azure Noir CDs, Silver Surfer figurines, posters both good (a Spider-Man film, Blood Simple, Adaptation and more) and cheesy (The Scorpion King, that horrid Planet of the Apes remake, and at least two copies of the Van Helsing poster, God help us), and a toy AT-AT, presiding over the swag piles and seemingly ready to blast away anyone who got these prizes LESS THAN HONESTLY. It worked.
There also was drinking, and drink-influenced behavior that was more fun to experience than to report on, and I don't feel like delving into that, so this is the last acknowledgement: people drank, and enjoyed their drinking. (No mean drunks, thank everything; it was closer to the "I love everythinnnnnnnnnng!" kind of drunk.)
The award-giving and trivia-questioning was broken into segments separated by eating-and-drinking-and-socializing time; I floated around, overheard some talks and took part in others. A cell of us including me and Emerson commiserated about experiencing the weird environment of Northeastern Oregon/Eastern Washington, a land of tumbleweeds and nuclear power plants and not much else. (Emerson grew up in the Tri-Cities; I lived from 1997 to 2000 in Hermiston, Oregon; and a couple of our fellow geeks were soon to go to a special company event out in that region. Emerson said "Why? There's nothing to do." Remembering the Columbia Center Mall up there, I added "It's like a post-apocalyptic MallRats.")
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(Also? Tempted, I was, to raise my hand to do the Top Gun scene where Maverick has to lead Cougar in to land ("We have a little problem, Mav. That MiG really screwed him up. I don't think he can make it back."). On my way home, I was thinking, "Dude! You should've done Chasing Amy's "Racist Star Wars" speech! Or the Baby Jay and Silent Bob bit in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back!'" But none of those likely would have beat the sentimental favorite-ness of The Princess Bride.)
Boo-Yah has begun. At least the awards thing has; it may return next year with a different name, created during a higher-quality drunk state (like what Coleridge had when writing Kubla Khan!). But THIS was my kind of awards ceremony. And many of the geeks attending would agree.