It's that time of the year - Hugo nominations

It's that time of the year when members of last year's Worldcon and members of the upcoming Worldcon try to figure out what were the best works in the past year in a whole bunch of categories, otherwise known as The Hugo Awards. I'll leave the fiction and other nominations to other blogs, but I thought I'd throw out a few things to be considered for the Dramatic Presentation award. The deadline for submitting ballots is midnight, March 1st, so there's a bit over a month left to figure things out (although if you aren't currently eligible to vote, you have to be a member of Devention 3 by Jan 31st to be eligible). You can keep track of the Hugos and other SF awards at the Science Fiction Awards Watch website.

In the Best Dramatic Presentation Award, they have a short form and a long form, which was split from a single award a couple of years ago to provide a means primarily to separate movies from TV episodes. However, this year there's several TV productions that might very well end up in the Long Form slot.

In the Long Form category, there's a good number of movies from the past year that can be considered, ones such as Stardust, Boewulf, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, The Golden Compass, Transformers, Spider-Man 3, I Am Legend, 30 Days of Night, and 28 Weeks Later all might get some votes. However, there is a call to nominate the first season of Heroes in the long form category (and, technically, the second season could be considered separately, since it will likely be considered finished in December due to the writer's strike) . In TV miniseries, there is also Hogfather, a four hour miniseries that first aired in the UK in 2006 but didn't air in the US until 2007, as well as Tin Man, the six hour miniseries from SciFi that aired in December.

The Short form category tends to be single episodes or two part episodes of TV series, so a two-parter or TV movie tends to fall in here since most of those are less than 90 minutes. Seeing as Doctor Who episodes by Steven Moffat have won the last two years, his episode "Blink" from last season is a front runner for this year. Even though it was the "Doctor Lite" episode from this season, Moffat delivered a story that provided one of the better episodes of the series. Also in contention from Doctor Who is the two parter "Human Nature/Family of Blood" written by Paul Cornell with some support also for the two part season finale of Doctor Who "The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords" written by Russell T. Davies. Besides Doctor Who, there was the two part season finale of Battlestar Galactica "Crossroads" as well as the TV movie "Razor" that aired in November. Also in consideration are shows like the Stargate SG-1 finale "Undending", The Torchwood debut "Things Change", and maybe episodes of The Dresden Files and Blood Ties. There's also the direct to DVD Babylon 5: The Lost Tales that might get a few votes. Babylon 5 did win two hugos for episodes before they split the Dramatic Presentation category. One non-broadcast show that has a good chance of making the ballot is the Star Trek New Voyages episode "World Enough and Time", written by Marc Scott Zicree and Michael Reaves and directed by Zicree with fan favorite Trek actor George Takei starring. Zicree screened the episode at Worldcon last year and got a very good response to it. This could be the wild horse that keeps Moffat from getting a hat trick of Hugos.