Funny thing: Awards shows represent everything that’s gone wrong with Hollywood, but on Saturday night, an awards show captured what feels right about the fledgling web TV industry.
It was the very first Streamy Awards, sponsored by Kodak and presented by the newly minted International Academy of Web Television, formed late last year to try to give some institutional structure and heft to the scattershot world of web TV.
Several hundred people filled the Wadsworth Theatre in West L.A. to watch the Academy give out 24 awards in a format that closely followed the Oscar or Emmy ceremonies, down to the mini-red carpet outside the theater. It was a show where traditional celebrities, including Lisa Kudrow and Linda Blair, joined cult-figure web TV stars like Sandeep Parikh and Felicia Day of the tech-nerd comedy series "The Guild."
Inside the auditorium, awards presenters, who included Illeana Douglas and Writers Guild president Patrick Verrone, read comedy bits off the teleprompter before they handed out awards.
But instead of the deadly ennui of the Oscars or Emmys there was an almost giddy spirit to the event -- like a joyriding teenager who’d stolen the keys to Mom and Dad’s car. For the band of Hollywood outsiders who managed to pull the evening together, it was clearly a thrill to borrow even the most rote of awards-show conventions.
Predictably, the big winner of the evening was a show with several strands of Hollywood DNA, Joss Whedon’s “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” which won Best Writing for a Comedy Web Series for Whedon. The show’s star, Neil Patrick Harris, also won Best Actor in a Comedic Web Series for playing the musical serial-killing, romantically frustrated Dr. Horrible.
“I feel like the establishment guy,” Whedon said apologetically as he picked up his award. He offered a sanguine view of the web TV industry’s future: “The TV industry right now is in a very funky state and seems to be falling apart. The Internet is coming up -- I have no idea where they’ll meet, but I know it begins here, and the people here are creating the bedrock of what’s going to be not just the 'new media,' but the media."
The first award of the evening, Best Web Reality Show, also went to a show revolving around a known Hollywood quantity, “The William Shatner Project,” which tracks William Shatner’s adventures. Shatner was not there, but his daughter, Lisabeth Shatner, who hosts the show, got a laugh when she kicked off her acceptance speech with, “I’d like to thank the Academy.”
And Rosario Dawson, who left before her category was up, won Best Female Actor in a Dramatic Series for her star turn in "Gemini Division."
But the lesser-known stalwarts of the web TV world were well represented too. Felicia Day won Best Female Actor in a Comedy Web Series for “The Guild,” and the show, which she created and writes, won for Best Comedy Series and Best Ensemble Cast. Day is emerging as the heart and soul of the Web TV world, with a clever Twitter
