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.

Doctor Hugh?

I don't know how serious the rumors were that there was serious consideration of Hugh Grant joining Doctor Who as Christopher (don't call me Ian) Eccleston's replacement, but it's an interesting idea. He did once play the Doctor for about a minute in “The Curse of the Fatal Death”, and he has the wit and sincerity to perhaps create his own style of the alien charm that is the character. This might have been a good idea for him too, since he's faced for a long time the problem of being typecast into the same type of character in an endless stream of romantic comedies, after helming the flagship of the genre, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and he did just do a movie with the queen of the RomCom section at the video store (if not the box office), Drew Barrymore. He himself has commented on the difficulty of finding a fresh take on the guy from 4W+1F when he's asked to play him for the seventeenth time. I could be forgetting something, but the last time I remember seeing him do something else besides feckless charm in a RomCom was a small part in The Remains of the Day, and that was going on 15 years ago. I suppose his character from About a Boy was enough of a selfish bastard to avoid that trap, and in Love, Actually he was essentially playing Tony Blair, and not the guy from Notting Hill, again. The other nice thing would have been that with Hugh Grant as the lead, Doctor Who would have gotten more mindshare in America, and we might have gotten more of it over here a little quicker. As it is, David Tennant has been great as the new Doctor, with a perfect mix of solemnity and humor, but I can't help wondering about the road not taken.