2007 Hugo Award Winners

Just as a public service announcement, here are the Hugo Award nominees and winners for television and film, since those are the ones I've seen:

Dramatic Presentation (long form)

Pan's Labyrinth (winner)
Children of Men
The Prestige
V for Vendetta
A Scanner Darkly

Dramatic Presentation (short form)

Doctor Who - "The Girl in the Fireplace" (winner)
Doctor Who - "Army of Ghosts" and "Doomsday"
Doctor Who - "School Reunion"
Battlestar Galactica - "Downloaded"
Stargate SG-1 - "200"

Of those, I've seen everything but the SG-1 episode, because everyone must draw a line in the sand.  Of the remaining nine films and television episodes, Children of Men and The Prestige are some of the most fascinating cinema I saw last year, V for Vendetta had its moments (it's like Titanic, everything not involving the two leads is great), and I really could have done without A Scanner Darkly and Pan's Labyrith.  (The links are to Rotten Tomatoes where I wrote about these movies back when I first saw them.)  All four Doctor Who episodes were brilliant, and the two-parter "Army of Ghosts" and "Doomsday" was a brilliant farewell to the dynamic of first two years of the show.  "Downloaded" was a really interesting twist for Battlestar Galactica turning the perspective completely around to the Cylons.  Finding that Six has a hallucination of Baltar to match his hallucination of her, each half sex kitten half coy prophet, was the first sign that a lot of assumptions would be shattered in the next season, but of course the whole thing wouldn't make any sense if you haven't seen the rest of the show... which is in my opinion the most fascinating thing on television besides Hugh Laurie's headlong plunge into crippling neurotic bitterness on House.

So there's one more reason to see Children of Men, The Prestige, or pretty much any episode of the new Doctor Who series, which had multiple Hugo nominees and two winners in the first two seasons alone, and has produced at least one equally cool spin-off in Torchwood, with the jury still out on the second spin-off until I find a way to watch it.  Torchwood, by the way, is like a British X-Files, only the man in charge is Captain Jack Harkness, who's basically the positive side of the European stereotype of Americans, intrusively enthusiastic or enthusiastically intrusive depending on how you look at it, wearing a big grin and a WWII aviator's cap, and one of the only bisexual characters on TV not played for laughs.  It is delightfully cool, dark, and a bit strange.