All right 2007, its your day of reckoning. Time to lay down the law and see who won, and who completely failed, this year. Lets roll. 

Best movie- 3:10 to Yuma

In a sea of abject, procrustean filmographic mediocrity this year, Yuma illuminated the festering smog of sub-par cinema. A modern day Western masterpiece, it actually successfully manged to not only pay due respects to the original movie from which it was based, but in this not so humble critic’s opinion, actually improved upon it. 5/5 stars, this will surely be remembered as a flawless epochal masterpiece of the genre.

Runner-ups: American Gangster, I Am Legend, The Golden Compass

Best Album- Dream Theater: Systematc Chaos

Technical, atmospheric, beautiful, heavy. An eclectic masterpiece by the premier virtuostic progressive metal and overall greatest musical outfit in the world, this was simply put a superb album. Contrasting against Metropolis pt. 2, Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence and Octavarium, this wasn’t a concept album, but rather an expansive and encompassing odyssey in sound. Every track stands on its own as a finely crafted strand in a grand artistic tableau, from the 26 minute long epic “In the Presence of Enemies” to the thrash-prog headbanger “The Dark Eternal Night” to the mellow and deeply moving vibrations of “Repentence”, this is surely one of DT’s best, and my nominee for album of the year.

Runner-ups: 3- The End is Begun, Opeth- The Roundhouse Tapes, Rush- Snakes & Arrows

Game of the Year- The Orange Box

There really isn’t any room for argument here. Half-Life 2 still champions as the greatest PC game of all time, but then when you couple it with both expansions, the most innovative puzzle game ever, and one of the greatest team based online multiplayer experiences ever conceived, there is simply zero room for debate.

Runner-up: Bioshock

Aight, now things get interesting….

Most Important Person- Benazir Bhutto

It is a tremendous tragedy that this nomination must arise from such sorrowful circumstances, but that can’t be helped. Bhutto, along with other Middle-Eastern reformer secularists the likes of Ataturk and Pahlavi, have always been my heroes. An incredibly educated and cultured Oxford trained woman, her unequivocal bravery cannot be disputed; she returned for no personal advantage or zealous ambition, willingly putting herself into a suicidal position just in an ultimately futile attempt ot reprieve the beleaguredcountry she so loved, only to be slain by some fundamentalist cretin (some say its al-Qaida, some sayts it was a Musharaff assassin, neither prospect would surprise me) In a sense, Pakistan has always been one of the most unrescuably squalid provinces of the Middle-East. From its inception as the failed religious experiment of the Indian traitor and fanatic Muhammad Ali Jinnah, its been for its entire lifespan a land devoid of resources, technology, intellectual surplus or a will to survive, instead mired by a maelstrom of totallitarianism and violence. Etymologically, “Pak” in Arabic translates to “clean”, and “Stan” translates to “land of”, an insulting and ludicrous Islamic formulation essentially envisaging a “kingdom of the undefiled”, free from the “Hindu pagans”. Gandhi had warned that Pakistan’s existence would be disastrous and would only segregate and damage the Indian people, to the deaf ears of a goonish messianic fool like Jinnah, Perhaps it is an inavoidable fate, that this is simply a state that is destined to fail, an absolute travesty that such an impressive and formidable human being like Bhutto had to perish because of it. Bite the hand that bleeds, Pakistan.

Runner-ups- Gen. David Petraeus and the United States Armed Forces

Tool of the Year- Jamie Lynn Spears

Oh my, this was probably the hardest catagory to adjudicate, for the sheer fact of the staggering over-saturation of the competition for the award nowadays. But really, it doesn’t really get much more miserable than leeching off of the worthless namesake of your talentless, fad-career dried rehab-whore sister, frontlining a phenomenally mediocre tween sitcom on a network so abysmally mired in consumerist gutter that it has actually managed the impossible feat of utterly relenquishing more of its former credibility than Disney, getting a date-rape pregnancy, and exploiting the situation to create a ghastly Frankenstein monster of a “pre-marital sex readiness special”, thus subverting every strain of moral conscience and individual integrity imaginable, all in one blow. Now thats what I call one worthless waste of human flesh, aka a tool. Congrats Jamie, it’ll be the only thing you’ll ever win in your life.

Runner-ups: Rosie O’Donnell, Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, Mike Huckabee, Al Gore, Andrew Meyer, Caitlin Upton

And thats about it, I gotta say this has been a great year on every front, heres hoping 2008 will bring more great things to praise and more imbeciles to make mockery of.

Happy New Year all, keep it prog, see ya in ‘08!