Arts & Entertainment >>

• Best Local Impresario
  Joe Edwards
  With his impressive lineup of current destinations (Blueberry Hill, the Pageant and Pin-Up Bowl, to name a few) Joe Edwards could be the perennial winner of this category just by resting on his laurels. But that's not Joe's style. In the past twelve months, our town's favorite promoter/developer... More >>
• Best Hair on a Local TV Personality (Female)
  Randi Naughton
  Redheaded television anchors seem about as common as good news in this town. Despite all the talk of job losses, buyouts, floods and famine (OK, we made that last one up), Randi Naughton's ginger top serves as an ever-bright flicker of hope that goes perfectly with our morning coffee. Those... More >>
• Best Hair on a Local TV Personality (Male)
  Marc Cox
  You gotta wonder whether KMOV-TV News 4 This Morning anchor Marc Cox ever feels a slight tinge of guilt when his job requires him to report on global warming. Because the gravity-defying wall of blond hair that sits firmly atop his head appears to be glued in place by enough hair spray to raise... More >>
• Best TV Station
  KETC-TV (Channel 9)
  Believe it or not, there are people out there who still don't have HDTV or TiVo. More shocking still is the fact that some folks don't even have cable. It's crazy, we know. But somehow these unfortunate souls are able to survive and have televised educational opportunities like the rest of us... More >>
• Best Weathercaster
  Chris Higgins
  In these modern times, weather predicting is more than just licking a finger and checking out the sky. There is hi-tech equipment involved with this job, along with a little luck (let's be honest). Not only does this city need someone who can translate all that fancy technology into plain... More >>
• Best Advertising Campaign
  Metro — Decongestant M
  Say what you will about Metro's budget shortfalls, failed lawsuits and scattershot train and bus service. When it comes to clever commercial spots, the transit agency's "Decongestant M" campaign hits like a bullet train. It's quick. It's timely. And — most important of all — it... More >>
• Best Theater
  Grandel Theatre
  The quality of a theater doesn't enhance the quality of the theater. Church basements, reclaimed storefronts, old black boxes — you can see a great show in any of these spaces in St. Louis almost year-round. But a truly beautiful theater, like the Grandel, well, it has the power to improve... More >>
• Best Local TV Commercial
  Dave Sinclair Automotive Group
  In spite of everything that clutters our screens, there actually can be dignity in local television commercials. Auto dealer Dave Sinclair proves it. For years this salesman has politely and respectfully come into our homes to tout his dealerships ("Hi, I'm Dave Sinclair, your south-county Ford... More >>
• Best Theater Company
  Circus Flora
  How do you like your theater? Do you like it high-flying or lowbrow? In your face or coolly sophisticated? Circus Flora has all the above. Are you looking for educational programs that encourage the participation of students? They've got it. Do you want a company that offers a track record of... More >>
• Best Stage Production
  Rabbit Hole
  The fact that the Studio Theatre is located in a veritable rabbit hole beneath the main stage at the Loretto-Hilton Center has little to do with why the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis staging of David Lindsay-Abaire's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Rabbit Hole was so quietly incandescent. It now... More >>
• Best Musical
  Oklahoma!
  Did anyone really want to see yet another Oklahoma! The answer was a decided yes — after we saw it. From the mooing of its offstage cows to the onstage windmill (that invited climbing), this Webster Conservatory mounting of the 65-year-old Rodgers & Hammerstein classic about farmers... More >>
• Best AM Radio Personality
  George Noory
  Can't sleep. What's on the radio? A deep voice. "From the heartland of America and the Gateway to the West...." Ah, tonight George Noory's broadcasting Coast to Coast AM (www.coasttocoastam.com) from his "cave" in St. Louis (as he was back in April when the earthquake struck — CNN talked... More >>
• Best Actress in a Play
  Nancy Lewis
  It's not hard to single out Nancy Lewis as an artist of boldness and daring. But how to single out one of her performances during this past year above the others? Lewis veritably slithered through her withering turn as the tyrannical Violet Venable in Stray Dog's Suddenly Last Summer, and she... More >>
• Best Actor in a Play
  Charlie Barron
  Before his career draws to a close — which we trust will not be for many, many years — Charlie Barron will probably end up acting in a one-man show about Rodney Dangerfield. Or, if the slender Barron doesn't want to put on the added pounds, he might opt for Cary Grant. For these are... More >>
• Best Actor in a Musical
  Lewis J. Stadlen
  Mel Brooks' The Producers was a quantum leap from the Muny's usual family-friendly "been there, done that" repertoire. But this paean to crassness was a terrific season opener, thanks in great measure to Lewis J. Stadlen's gloriously misanthropic performance as the incorrigible Max Bialystock.... More >>
• Best Actress in a Musical
  Katie McGee
  You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown is usually about innocuous smiles and chuckles. It preaches the gospel of forgiveness, because it reminds us that we all have more than our share of shortcomings. But the production earlier this year at Saint Louis University was also about attitude. As Snoopy,... More >>
• Best Shakespeare Production
  Measure for Measure
  Why is Shakespeare still being performed with regularity? Because when it's presented as thoughtfully and passionately as Mustard Seed Theatre's production of Measure for Measure, it teaches you more about yourself than ten years of therapy (and there are more laughs, as well). Director Deanna... More >>
• Best Children's Theater Production
  Go Dog Go!
  P.D. Eastman's beloved tail (see what we did there?) of dogs coming and going while dissing a lady dog's hat is a quick read. Adapting it for the stage requires a much longer run time than a young audience might be able to tolerate. Hence the ten-minute break in the middle, during which the dogs... More >>
• Best One-Person Show
  The Good Thief
  It's not that Joe Hanrahan is opposed to acting in the company of other people. But apparently he's happiest onstage alone, getting all his dialogue out of the way in one lump and saying everything he has to say in an hour rather than stretching it out in short speeches over two and a half. When... More >>
• Best Ensemble Cast
  Kindertransport
  What is the measure of ensemble acting? Sometimes it means that actors are breathing in sync and anticipating each other's smallest tics. But the ensemble acting in the New Jewish staging of Diane Samuels' British play Kindertransport was of a different nature. In telling the story of a young... More >>
• Best Theater Surprise
  Brian Stokes Mitchell
  Last fall, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the reopening of the Fox Theatre, Linda Eder and Brian Stokes Mitchell appeared together in a concert billed as a celebration of the American musical. Most of the advance publicity went to Eder. But at the concert itself, front-act Mitchell... More >>
• Best Kvetchers
  Dorothy Farmer Davis, Suzanne Greenwald, Eleanor Mullin
  There's Neil Simon, and then there's Neil Simon. The West End Players Guild's recent staging of The Prisoner of Second Avenue offered America's most commercially successful playwright at both his best and his less-than-best. Thirty-one years after it debuted on Broadway, this 1971 comedy-drama... More >>
• Best FM Radio Personality (3 Comments)
  Bob McCabe
  Affable, funny and unfailingly optimistic, National Public Radio local affiliate KWMU (90.7 FM) newsman Bob McCabe makes every weekday brighter. From 5 to 11 a.m. each morning, he puts his own spin on everything from the local stock report to the forecast. McCabe has been in front of people all... More >>
• Best 18th-Century Comedy by Oliver Goldsmith
  She Stoops to Conquer
  So maybe there's not a lot of competition in this category. (OK, not any.) But that's not to diminish the many delights of the Washington University Performing Arts Department's spunky production of She Stoops to Conquer. Even if we added Restoration comedy into the mix, then threw in all Kabuki... More >>
• Best Curtain Call
  Bernie Passeltiner
  Theater is nothing if not tradition and continuity. So to see Bernie Passeltiner return to the Loretto-Hilton in the title role in the St. Louis Rep production of Tuesdays with Morrie, knowing that Passeltiner had appeared on that same stage 41 years earlier in the company's debut production,... More >>
• Best Film Festival
  St. Louis International Film Festival
  It happens all the time. You're on the phone with your friend in New York or LA or Chicago and she says, "Omigod, I've just seen the most amazing movie! You have to see it. It will change your life." Invariably it's not scheduled to play St. Louis for three more months, and by the time it opens,... More >>
• Best Movie Theater
  Chesterfield Galaxy 14
  Let's be straight: Wehrenberg's Chesterfield Galaxy 14 Cine takes this category because the sound system here will blow your face off. That and the fact that the Mega Screen (the largest in the Midwest) is big enough to broker the suspension of disbelief if the film's story fails to do so. Haute... More >>
• Best Time Machine
  The Friends of Scott Joplin
  These days, it's hard to see the appeal of the 1904 World's Fair. Yeah, it gave us hot-dog buns and ice-cream cones, not to mention Forest Park, but that song! "Meet me in St. Louie, Louie, meet me at the Fair..." Maybe 104 years ago people actually enjoyed hearing it, but now that we've endured... More >>
• Best Museum
  Miniature Museum of Greater St. Louis
  It's often said that St. Louis is a big small town — large enough to be considered a full-fledged city, but small enough that natives manage to run into old high school classmates on every trip to the grocery store. The concept of the "small town" takes on a more literal meaning at the... More >>
• Best Museum Exhibition
  Thaddeus Strode: Absolutes and Nothings
  Cavemen pondering a pot of gold, jailbirds plotting their escape with a pickax, comic-strip frogs and headless inspectors — for a few months last spring St. Louis got an oversize-canvas look at the extraordinary work of Los Angeles artist Thaddeus Strode. Strode grew up surfing and skating... More >>
• Best Art Gallery
  White Flag Projects
  Any talk about our town's tameness when it comes to art and art galleries comes to a quick conclusion with three trips down the tongue each ending in "Y": Tighty Whitey Party. Derided by some as a glorified toga party, regaled by others as our town's answer to American Apparel's heroin chic,... More >>
• Best Gallery Exhibition
  Every Man For Himself/God Against All
  Curated by Hesse McGraw, Every Man For Himself/God Against All took its name from Werner Herzog's 1974 film, which details the true story of Kaspar Hauser, a wild child who appeared seemingly out of nowhere in 19th-century Nuremberg. Like the title that inspired it, the well-attended show was an... More >>
• Best Art Gallery to Die in the Past Year
  Ellen Curlee Gallery
  Galleries are sort of like plant species: Some are perennial and blossom anew each season, others are annuals that blossom briefly before fading away. The Ellen Curlee Gallery, we now know, belonged to the latter class. But oh, what a bloom it was! Concentrating on modern fine-art photography,... More >>
• Best Radio Station
  WARH (106.5 FM "The Arch")
  If the Arch (106.5 FM) were a pair of shoes, it would be lovingly worn-in Converse high-tops: shabby but chic, comfortable and familiar. Driven by the motto "It's all about the variety," the station is actually all about comfort-food music, the familiar tunes that conjure memories of proms,... More >>
• Best New Art Gallery
  Maps Contemporary Art Space
  OK, so it's not technically in St. Louis, or even Missouri, for that matter, but Maps Contemporary Art Space deserves honorary St. Louis citizenship for its street cred alone. Working out of a small Belleville storefront, brothers B.j. and Chris Vogt consistently present challenging works... More >>
• Best Art Series
  The Front Room
  If you run a contemporary art museum, you're bound to run into trouble sooner or later. On the one hand, you are running a museum, meaning you have to present formal shows of museum-caliber work. On the other hand, you're running a museum of contemporary art, meaning you want to bring your... More >>
• Best Arts Organization (2 Comments)
  Laumeier Sculpture Park
  Some cities, poor schmucks that they are, feel blessed to have a few pieces of art hanging around the public square — a di Suvero here, maybe a Calder there. We in St. Louis can only look on those poor cities and smile. After all, our town houses Laumeier Sculpture Park, which at 105 acres... More >>
• Best Local Artist
  Juan William Chávez
  Two thousand and eight may have been the Year of the Rat according to the Chinese zodiac, but for the St. Louis art scene it was the Year of the Chávez. Juan William Chávez began the year by winning (along with artists Corey Escoto and Michelle Oosterbaan) the Contemporary Art... More >>
• Best Local Poet (3 Comments)
  Richard Newman
  There's poetry in basketball, sure, but most people find it in the arc of a perfect free throw, not in a game of H-O-R-S-E. Those same people also don't find much poetry in mowing the lawn. Or in digging coins out of their pockets to pay the lip-pierced cashier at the convenience store. But... More >>
• Best Book by a Local Author (1 Comment)
  Confessions of a Mob Hitman
  OK. Just look at that title. How can you resist the confessions of a mob hit man? Especially if they're true? Ray Flynn grew up during the Depression in Kerry Patch, the old Irish neighborhood in north St. Louis. He embarked upon a life of crime at the age of seventeen with a fake... More >>
• Best Comic Book
  Pangaea
  A self-published, warts-and-all collection of comic strips banged out while the artist was at his day job couldn't possibly be this entertaining...could it? Wolf's drawing is a little rough at times, and he could really use the aid of a letterer or at least some handwriting practice, but it's... More >>
• Best Local Cartoonist
  Matt Kindt
  Dossier #: 009252008 Name: Matt Kindt Seminal work: Super Spy, graphic novel, released 2007. A collection of 52 intertwined stories about the daily lives of spies in Europe during World War II, Super Spy is by turns thrilling and poignant. It is always beautifully drawn and colored. It is even... More >>
• Best Reading Series
  Left Bank Books
  All of a sudden, it's cool to be an author again. Long stigmatized as reclusive know-it-alls, writers nowadays are enjoying more recognition (and less stereotypical descriptions). As any good independent bookstore knows, author visits make the reading experience that much more enjoyable for the... More >>
• Best Casino (1 Comment)
  Lumière Place
  From the psychedelic carpet underfoot to whiz-bang gadgetry that hangs in the form of flat-screen TVs above, Lumière Place is St. Louis' newest and only entertainment complex downtown that includes a neon mullet. The light fixture that graces the casino's Four Seasons hotel resembles a... More >>
• Best Crime Blotter
  Rock Hill Police Department
  Owing to their hardboiled prose style, crime blotters can be funny to read. (Granted, the types of offenses covered in most law-and-order sections are no laughing matter. But still.) Paul Arnett, the police chief of tiny Rock Hill, is totally down with that. In recent months, Arnett has written... More >>
• Best Strip Joint
  Penthouse Club
  You're not here for the cheap cover. You're not here for the cheap drinks. And you're definitely not here for the cheap lap dance. You're here for the ladies. And at the Penthouse Club, "where the magazine comes to life," the ladies rule. This chain, which comprises more than a dozen locations... More >>
• Best Sound
  The Delmar Loop on a Friday night
  It's funny how the amalgamation of several individually annoying sounds can sometimes morph into an accidental symphony of invigorating energy. The Delmar Loop on a Friday night certainly qualifies, as droves of chattering teens, cacophonous hippy drum circles, sub-low bass frequencies rattling... More >>
• Best Zoo Animal
  Polar bear
  Sure, there were babies born to other, perhaps more cuddly animals this year. And some of those animals have funny names — if you're of the Beavis & Butt-Head persuasion and involuntarily giggle every time you hear the word "ass." But there's only one polar bear remaining at the Saint... More >>
• Best Newspaper Columnist
  Joe Whittington
  It doesn't take a degree to see why the editors of St. Louis' Only Daily run Joe Whittington's weekly business column on Thursday. Most of the "business news" in this town comes out Fridays and reads like "Local Commerce for Dummies." A fix of Whittington, on the other hand, goes down like a... More >>
• Best Reporter (Newspaper Division)
  Carolyn P. Smith
  Since 2005 Carolyn Smith has covered crime in the seedy parts of St. Clair and Madison counties for the Belleville News-Democrat. This has to rank as one of the most depressing, frightening and, to put it mildly, lively beats on the planet. In the past year alone, when gunmen opened fire on a... More >>
• Best Reporter (TV/Radio Division)
  John Mills
  John Mills is the best television news reporter in St. Louis because he doesn't try to be your friend through the tube. In a deep voice that makes one wonder why he didn't go into radio, Mills delivers fact-driven pieces that are original and not pulled wholesale from the local newspaper website... More >>
• Best TV News Anchor (1 Comment)
  Art Holliday
  Art Holliday's the antithesis of Don Henley's "bubbleheaded bleach-blond...can tell you about the plane crash with a gleam in her eye." Even casual viewers of Today in St. Louis or NewsChannel Five at Noon have likely seen the anchor/executive producer's perfectionist nature unfold live on... More >>