I kind of fixed my award ceremony glitch. I backed up my saves then experimented a bit. If the sim getting the award dies and you then reset the other sims gathered they don't return to zerg the town hall. Killing one sim to save the neighbourhood was the only solution that's worked for me so far.
If you just let them keep going, after a while they get huge needs decay and as soon as an active sim enters the town hall lot all the gathered sims start to die of starvation. At one point poor grimmy had 17 dead bodies piled up to deal with and more dieing as he collected them.
For the force kill of the award sim and reset of all sims at once I used the NRaas Super Computer mod found here
http://ts3.tscexchange.com/index.php?board=105.0I'm sure there must be a better fix out there though so I'll keep trying other things.