While most people know the Hugo Awards as a literary award for the top science fiction and fantasy works of the past year they also hand out awards for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form & Short Form. The Long Form award typically is for the best film with occasional audio books garnering recognition as well, while the short form is typically dominated by television shows. Like most awards, the Hugo’s are voted upon by the members of Worldcon, which is dominated by science fiction and fantasy authors and creators. In conjunction with the Nebula Awards, the Hugo represents the highest honor for science fiction and fantasy creators.

This year marked a landmark group of possible winners for the Long Form category. Nominees included Wall-E, The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Hellboy 2 and METAtropolis (an audio book). One of the more interesting aspects of the Hugo Award voting system is that they not only publish the voting results (you paying attention Oscars) but they also employ run off voting making for some interesting results. As for the actual winners, you might be surprised to learn that Wall-E beat out The Dark Knight to win the 2009 Hugo Award.

Even more exciting was the winner of the Short Form Award, that being the online mini series Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog, which beat out episodes of Doctor Who, Battlestar Gallactica and Lost to take the award. That’s one heck of a feat for a web series to knock off the three biggest science fiction television shows currently going.

For those of us who dig the minutia, the voting results are after the break.

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Neil Gaiman has been kind enough to post a link to this incredible, detailed interview about the writing the now legendary Sandman, its influence on modern comics, his fans, people he’s worked with and some fascinating tales about following around Guillermo del Toro on the set of Hellboy II in order to learn how to direct a movie. If you haven’t ever heard Neil speak you are in for a real treat.

Close circuit to Reed Farrington: Be sure to listen for Neil’s impersonation’s of William Shatner AND Harlan Ellison. They are priceless.

The entire hour and a half interview is embedded below. Enjoy!

I always had a soft spot for John Carpenter. As a kid, he was the first director whose name meant something to me. Seeing his name flash across the screen for the commercials for The Fog when I was a child left an impression that I’m still trying to shake off today. More than any other director, Carpenter appeared to be making movies just for me. Halloween and The Fog were there when I was first discovering horror movies. Escape from New York, The Thing and Starman arrived when I was exploring other genres. When I discovered Stephen King, Christine arrived at the video store. When I stumbled on martial arts movies, he gave me Big Trouble in Little China. When I became interested in science, Carpenter churned out the underrated Prince of Darkness (a pessimistic and claustrophobic End of Days story offset by the optimism of quantum physics). And when I started to question authority, along came They Live (a movie remembered more for its excess than its restraint). Looking at Carpenter’s work from The Fog (1980) to They Live (1988), not only is it an impressive resume, but it is a body of work that perfectly reflects the paranoia, glut and cynicism that was the Eighties.

Sadly, the Nineties would not be a good time for Carpenter, and this, like many of us, is when I started to lose interest in his work. Memoirs of an Invisible Man, while inventive at times, is painful and never quite understands what kind of movie it wants to be; all of this is made worse by the fact that many scenes practically scream studio intervention.

So when I saw the trailer for 1995’s In the Mouth of Madness, I tried not to get my hopes too high. The good news was the movie ended up being pretty good, and the bad news was that it would be Carpenter’s last good movie. (more…)