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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First off, I’d like to apologize for getting so literary with this column. I always assume Matt breaks down in tears whenever sees one of my posts. I do have reviews of Federico Fellini’s La Strada, John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, and Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (which might just have one of the greatest and most compact scripts in cinema history) in line; however, they are not finished. I also want to talk about the amazing pop cultural pastiche that is The Venture Bros. sometime down the road as well. I was in the process of working on a two part piece about liberature (no, I spelled it right) and how video games can provide hints to literature’s ability to remain valid in the 21^st century, when I decided it would be best to do something a little more…light. Don’t worry though, the literary torture will resume next week.

In the meantime, since I’ve been living in Poland for five years this month, I thought it might be fun to make some general observations about Polish pop culture from an American’s perspective. (more…)

Going to keep it short this week. I’ve been pretty busy and I am trying to keep pace with all the reviews I need to write. Quick site announcement, be on the lookout for 2, yes 2, giveaways next week. Only one of the movies is outright horrible, the other is just plain odd. And in a blatantly shameless plug, please check out my review of Tropic Thunder over at Cinema Fusion. As far as I know it is a scoop, so I’m sure I will be asked to take it down by the end of the weekend.

As for new releases this week the only one I care about is Hellboy II. I don’t care if the greatest independent film of all-time is being released, I’m going to Guillermo del Toro’s latest masterpiece.

On DVD next Tuesday comes Penelope, which wasn’t half bad. Certainly worth a rental. I also heard that The Year My Parents Went On Vacation is pretty good. Then their is … good grief that might be it. Yikes.

As always trailers are after the break!

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