Monday, April 20, 2015

My Serious Kitten nominations


I opened Three Star Wars trailers: movie, television, and video game by writing that it was the first to two Sunday entertainment entries and concluded the entry by telling my readers to "Stay tuned for a follow-up to 2015 Hugo nominees for movies and television."  I left some business unfinished in that post.
That brings me to the controversy.  Neither snubbed movie was on the slate put forth by Sad Puppies, which is loosely affiliated with GamerGate, but three of the five nominees were.  In fact, a lot of the nominees for other categories were on that slate, which led to a lot of gnashing of teeth among fans.  I might return to this later, but I have to cut this entry short to go to work.  Until then, read A.V. Club's This year's Hugo Award nominees are a messy political controversy for an explanation.
Follow over the jump for the response to the ballot stuffing scandal from We Hunted the Mammoth, which was to start their own awards, along with my nominations for the awards.

David Futrelle of We Hunted the Mammoth decided to take matters into his own hands with help from his readers.
Well, it looks like the Hugo Awards are pretty much busted this year.

So it occurred to me: there are a lot of very sharp, very well-informed SF/fantasy fans that read this blog (and at least one award-winning SF author that I know of). So why not do a little awarding of our own?

And so I would like to welcome you to the First Annual We Hunted The Mammoth Serious Kitten Awards.

Nominate your favorites in the categories below - and if there are any more categories you think I should add, suggest them. Every category with at least 5 nominees will be voted on in a future post; the rest will be dropped.

Use your best judgment when choosing the right category for your nominations. Speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror, all good. EBooks, self-published books, all fine. I'll make other rules/clarifications/pronouncements as necessary.

The only thing that isn't fine: No nominations for anyone or any work included in the Sad Puppies or Rabid Puppies Hugo slates, except in the "worst" categories, if you think they deserve it. The point is to highlight work that might otherwise get overlooked because of the Sad/Rabid Puppies ballot-stuffing.
I love awards almost as much as I love holidays, so I submitted my nominations for the categories I know something about.
I was wondering when you'd get around to this topic.  I blogged about the Gators and their allies tampering with the 2015 Hugo nominees for movies and television.  I actually agreed with the nominations of "Edge of Tomorrow," "Guardians of the Galaxy," and "Interstellar," but thought that "Snowpiercer" and "Under the Skin" were snubbed.  Thanks for giving your readers an opportunity to nominate works not tainted by misogyny.
Here's my ballot for the categories I care about.
•Best Comic/Graphic Novel: The Walking Dead, All Out War
•Best Webcomic: Girl Genius (if there are no other webcomics nominated, then Darths&Droids)
•Best SF site: io9
•Best SF blog: Crazy Eddie's Motie News (the rules don't disallow self-nomination, so I'm nominating my own blog)
•Best SF movie: Snowpiercer
•Best SF TV series:  The Walking Dead (if that is disallowed, then Extant)
•Best SF podcast/Youtube channel: Nerdist
•Best SF Twitterer: John Scalzi
•Coolest SF person: Neil Gaiman
•Biggest SF asshole: Vox Dei
•Worst SF movie: Atlas Shrugged III: Who Is John Galt?
•Worst SF TV series: Mission Control (NBC ordered six episodes and cancelled the series before showing any of them; if it doesn't qualify then The Last Ship--I like it, but Michael Bay)
I'll check the previous page of comments to see if I can nominate more than one per category.  If I can, then quoth The Terminator, "I'll be back."
I followed through with my promise to submit more nominations if they were allowed.
I see our host has already answered my implied question: "Feel free to nominate more than one book/person/etc per category."  Very well, then, I amend my nomination ballot.

•Best Webcomic: In adddion to Girl Genius, I also nominate Darths&Droids, Order of the Stick, Erfworld, and Goblins.
•Best SF movie: In addition to Snowpiercer, I also nominate Under the Skin, Divergent, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and Birdman (magical realism is a form of SF)
•Best SF TV series:  In addition to the The Walking Dead, I nominate Extant, The 100, Constantine, Warehouse 13, and Resurrection.
•Worst SF movie: In addition to Atlas Shrugged III: Who Is John Galt?, I nominate the rest of the SF movies that I mentioned in Razzies and Robocop, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Legend of Hercules, and Transformers: Age of Extinction, plus Left Behind.

Also games: I second Dragon Age: Inquisition and add the English language release of Archeage.
I may have thought "Game of Thrones" belonged on the list of Hugo nominees and been pleased that "Grimm" made the list, but both were tainted by being included in either the Sad Puppies or Rabid Puppies slates, so I left both off.  The same was true of "Edge of Tomorrow," "Guardians of the Galaxy," and "Interstellar," worthy as I thought all were.

I promise to keep my readers apprised of developments in both the Hugo Awards and the Serious Kitten Awards.  Stay tuned.

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