I noticed during tonight’s live broadcast of the 2008 MTV Movie Awards that the cameras panned frequently over to Transformers director Michael Bay seated in the audience. (Amusingly enough the first time they flashed on Bay was when Will Smith was accepting the award for Best Male Performance for I Am Legend and Smith admitted to making some bad movies. Bay directed Smith in Bad Boys and Bad Boys II.)

Anyhow, they seemed to show Bay a lot, which led me to believe that Transformers would probably win the Best Picture award — and it did.

While Bay was accepting his MTV popcorn award, he mentioned Transformers 2, saying, “We’re starting Transformers [2] tomorrow.”

Reports were that filming was already underway for Transformers 2 in Los Angeles, so Bay is obviously referring to the shoot scheduled to begin tomorrow at the former Bethlehem Steel site in Bethlehem, PA. As previously reported, filming activity is set to include “military helicopters, large scale pyrotechnics, prop guns and squibs, and large lights.”

The Morning Call confirms that one of the movie’s opening scenes will be shot at the site and that gigantic Bethlehem Steel blast furnaces will be featured. Bethlehem Mayor John Callahan said that over three nights a film crew will shoot the scene, which is the setting for a fictional Chinese city.

I have family members in Bethlehem, PA, who I plan to call right now, because Callahan also hinted that during the filming the townspeople can expect to see a lot of Bay’s trademark explosions.

It seems like the entire shoot will just be of explosions and the like, because none of the human actors — returning stars Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, and John Turturro — will be on set and the Transformers themselves will be added in later as CG animation.