NME USA Awards

We're a little bit confused, still, about the point of the NME's American awards, where most of the prize winners seem to be the same sort of people who win the UK awards, just given out by slightly different people.

And surely nobody would bother inventing an entire awards show purely to allow Perez Hilton a chance to give a prize to the Klaxons? Hilton didn't go down that well, either:

There was quite a lot of booing when gossip dude Perez Hilton took to the stage. All he was trying to do was present the Award for Best International Track to Klaxons.

I quite liked him, actually. He said some nice things about us, about putting Beth Ditto being naked on the cover of NME and how "frikin' awesome" he thought that was. And he did a kind of "Fuck Bush!" thing, which is always nice.

To be honest, for a weekly magazine, it's not that good news if the nicest thing he can think of to mention was about 48 issues ago; more to the point - does it really matter that Perez Hilton thought that the Ditto cover was "awesome"? Just because he likes something you've done doesn't automatically validate his opinions.

Mind you, Hilton wasn't the most out-of-place presence of the evening: Tom from MySpace, everyone's default friend, was called upon to hand out prizes; presumably in return for Rupert Murdoch's sponsorship. The Klaxons tried to bounce him off the stage.

The winners, in full, then:

Best band: The Killers
Best album: The Foo Fighters
Best film: Juno
Best international live act: Arcade Fire
Best new international live act (and could there be any more tortuous category name than that?): The Klaxons
Best new live act: Vampire Weekend
Best tv: Heroes
Best international solo artist: Kate Nash
Best new solo artist: Mark Ronson
Best breakthrough act: Santogold
Best solo artist: Albert Hammond Jr
Best international album: Favourite Worst Nightmare - Arctic Monkeys
Best Indie/Alternative Track: The Killers - Tranquiliser
Best Indie/Alternative Live Band: My Chemical Romance

The oddest thing is the way a London-based musical publication is pretending to be American for these awards - surely the Britishness of NME is its main selling point to an American audience, and yet all of a sudden it's suggesting that Kate Nash is somehow foreign. Curious.

Inspiration winner (again) Mick Jones wasn't entirely helpful to his hosts:

Former Clash principal Mick Jones received the Inspiration Award. He said he used to read NME religiously every week as a youngster.

"I don't now. I scan it on the Internet, like the rest of you," he added.

Let's hope he doesn't prove too inspirational and sparks off a flurry of subscription cancellations, then.