My interest in the Academy Awards is largely academic. LORD OF THE RINGS, my favorite movie this year, is a good movie, but not the sort that wins Best Picture Awards. Besides, it's a first part of three, hardly a finished tour de force on its own. It's been nominated for the most awards, but I doubt if it'll get the really big ones, although I expect it to get best special effects, best sets, that sort of thing. The sf/fantasy ghetto that we're used to. Even Ian McKellan, who played Gandalf and is up for best supporting actor, will probably be eclipsed---devervedly, from what I hear---by Ben Kingsley in SEXY BEAST.
Nevertheless, like much of the country, I have it on in the background, and have an academic interest in who wins, who loses. I might like Denzel Washington rather than Russell Crowe to get best actor, and Halle Barry rather than Sissy Spacek who wins as best actress.
As for the Internet, there are certainly comic strips that I think need encouragement, and money, and make the Internet a joy to go to. Why comic strips? Because that's about the only place I'm seeing new characters...continuing characters....being created on the Net.
I nominate BRUNO both for best comic strip on the Internet and best realized female character. Poor Baldwin is coping with a nine-to-five job and turndowns from newspaper syndicates...and is nevertheless creating one of the most interesting and moving characters on the Net.
Drop him a line, will you? Encourage him. He's going through a rough patch. I deplore, unlike most other webcomic stips, he has no Amazon Honor System or Paypal to directly pay him. You have to buy his products, the one defect I find in a strip I almost invariably turn to first, Monday through Saturday.
As for the best Male character in a Web comic strip, I have to nominate SLUGGY FREELANCE. To be perfectly honest, I thought the strip was enjoyable but not ...memorable, not moving---until the recent FIRE AND RAIN sequence. (Go back and look it up. It will reward you severalfold.) Sluggy's sacrifice towards the end, the leaving of Zoe who he has obviously loved for months, brought a new depth and feeling to a character I had previously thought was a paper doll.
Characters: Zoe and Sluggy...but Sluggy's the main character, and I'll never be able to think of him as just a four-panel joke again.
Best supporting character: there are so many enjoyable ones---Bun-Bun, the murderous and deadly rabbit in Sluggy Freelance---Diablo, the Satanist chicken in GOATS---they both sound absurd, and both are perfectly delightful.
Yet my choice would be God and the Devil, both of whom play supporting---and delightful---parts in the inspired SINFEST, a manga-inspired strip that is delightful without being pompous, sometimes asks serious questions in delightfully irreverent ways.
Best writing? That would go to a newcomer, the incredibly and engagingly offensive SOMETHING POSITIVE. The "double dildo of Destiny" is a phrase that will haunt me for months. When Aubrey and PeeJee started having their periods at the same time of the month, you knew any male within eyeshot would be effectively castrated.
Not for the faint of heart. Not for reading at work if someone can look over your shoulder. Yet not to be missed.
Some projects are too new to evaluate, but MODERN TALES looks quite promising, and easily worth the modest price they're asking for looking at everything.
Amazingly, most of these people do this for the joy of doing it. Not for their getting rich, although of course they would like it. For the sheer joy of creation.
For that, they surely need a little applause, and encouraging email. Have at it.