Regrettably, the entertainment world loves to periodically deify itself with self-involved award shows such as the Oscars, Grammies and a dog's breakfast of (even) lesser awards. All these events are about as entertaining as a marathon of American Idol--without the token-caricature-evil-English-guy--and they're roughly as classy and legitimate as well.
No wonder then that awards given thorugh the web or about the web are so much more entertaining. Heck, the Webby Awards even ordain that acceptance speeches be no more than five words. You just won't see that amount of fun and shear brilliance presented in or about the real world.

Spacecast your vote

Canada's version of the sci-fi channel, Space, is holding its inaugural Spaceys award show. The best part of this, like all web polls of course, is the ability to pick your own favourites in several geeky categories.

My Picks:

Favourite Tv Series

Farscape - Hands down, the best sci-fi on television at this moment.

Favourite Canadian Series

Tracker - Does this category matter? Each candidate is as atrociously difficult to watch as the other.

Favourite Movie Villain

Dr. Evil - One word for those who don't understand: Mag-ma.

Favourite TV Hottie

Buffy - Although it is a disappointing shortlist; I always thought Anya was hotter.

Favourite Movie Hero

Jean Luc Picard - Aragorn is a favourite and Nemesis was disappointing, but Patrick Stewart's starfleet performances are always top-notch.

Favourite Creature Character

Pilot - I know, I know: Yoda and Gollum are more impressive. However, I still like the multi-armed guy with the nicest demeanour this side of the galaxy.

(an HTML aside: why must sites resize my browser? I nearly didn't vote because of the utter annoyance of having my browser settings over-ridden by a third-party was AKIN TO READING SOMETHING IN ALL CAPS. Sadly, I've found that that the amount of sites employing this annoying javascript are on the rise. It feels a second coming of brain-dead practices like <blink> and pop-unders.)

Trusted by millions

Whereas the Spaceys are mostly for sci-fi geeks, the Webby Awards are best viewed as a smorgasboard of web surfing hot spots for everyone. Algorithmic wondertools like Google are useful for finding out more great sites regarding what you already know. However, such engines can't approximate what is a digital equivalent to say your newspaper's Weekend Arts & Review section's ability to bring conventional media's diamonds in the rough to your attention. The Webby nominees list represents perhaps the best repository we have for discovering and appreciating the best content available in this medium. How else would you find such gems as Get Your War On or Eric Conveys an Emotion in Humour or a music video of David Hasselhoff's rendition of "Hooked on a Feeling" found, appropriately, under Weird.

"MTV Sucks"

Only one thing worth noting in conventional awards and it happened at the MTV Movie Awards--which are perhaps slightly more palatable than most TV glitz-fests, but still tremondously lame when it comes to tolerating any of the participants' canned and corny lines. However, this year's rendition features what is quite possibly the best acceptance speech ever... even if Tolkien may now be rolling over in his grave.