ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT >>

• BEST ACTOR
  D'Ambrose is unavoidable--regular theatergoers are liable to see him onstage a half-dozen times per year in an amazing variety of venues. This past year, the lanky, wry performer has graced the stage of the Park Square Theatre, the Loring Playhouse, the Mixed Blood Theatre, and, most notably,... More >>
• BEST ACTRESS
  The Theatre de la Jeune Lune and the 15 Head companies don't share an aesthetic, exactly, but when performers from one company show up on the stage of another, it isn't at all surprising. Both companies are meticulously, and often comically, physical. Both companies seem to enjoy creating... More >>
• BEST AM RADIO PERSONALITY
  At 8:00 p.m. on weeknights, Tommy Mischke signs on from "good old St. Paul," and for two hours the world is a better place to be. Not that The Mischke Broadcast is rosily predictable. During a given broadcast, its host might, variously, take calls from listeners, spin comic meditations on the... More >>
• BEST ART CINEMA
  Whether or not U Film goes along with Oak Street Cinema's recent proposal to merge the two organizations (don't ask Al Milgrom for more details), the fact remains that much of what it gave us during the past 12 months was both indispensable and very much in keeping with its longstanding mission... More >>
• BEST ART GALLERY
  Who isn't a sucker for the dingy, illicit feel of an underground art gallery? Who doesn't get a thrill when entering a rehabilitated warehouse space where a flimsy partition hides the possessions of the gallery owners? Where a plywood floor hides the toxic ooze of the previous tenants, and... More >>
• BEST BOOK BY A LOCAL AUTHOR
  At first blush, Cheri Register's memoir about coming of age during the 1959 strike at Albert Lea's Wilson & Co. meatpacking plant might seem limited in appeal: The events are remote; most of the protagonists have passed on; and the conflict, which left this Minnesota hamlet bitterly divided... More >>
• BEST CHOREOGRAPHER
  In the 20 years that Robin Stiehm has been dancing, she has assimilated a range of styles from classical ballet to postmodern moves. Her recent choreography compresses and redirects these aesthetics into startlingly original dance images. The four works presented in Stiehm's concert at the... More >>
• BEST DANCE PERFORMANCE IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS
  Dance is no more philosophical than its legs, to paraphrase the choreographer Merce Cunningham. The synergy between choreographers and dancers is the stuff of which this art form is made, and it was present in abundance throughout Cathy Young's concert last May. The nine performers (including... More >>
• BEST DANCER
  Maybe it's the weather, maybe it's the work ethic, but the Twin Cities are rife with gifted dancers who make competent choreography look good, and good dances look even better. A highlight among highlights is 23-year-old Laura Selle, who currently dances for several of the best choreographers... More >>
• BEST DIRECTOR
  In two productions this past year, Andrew Kim has demonstrated himself to be in possession of a rare quality in theater: an evolving, original directorial vision. Both City Rhapsody at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre and Passage at Intermedia Arts (co-produced by Theater Mu)... More >>
• BEST FILM
  Easily the most accomplished (and the funniest) local feature to come down the pike since Driver 23, this fiendishly creative, girl-centered coming-of-age farce by writer-producer-director Tara Spartz begins with a borderline obscene vignette linking babysitting to prostitution and just builds... More >>
• BEST FM RADIO PERSONALITY
  In the increasingly sterile world of Twin Cities FM radio, where three media conglomerates change formats like pairs of socks and "personalities" tend to be drab folks who quite literally may be doing their shifts from other cities, one voice on the dial resonates with human charm. Pete Lee has... More >>
• BEST HIP-HOP RADIO PROGRAM
  Before it moved from Saturday mornings (2:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m.) to Saturday nights (9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m.), 2 the Break-A-Dawn's final 60 minutes represented perhaps the finest hour on local radio. Watching the sun come up while listening to track after track of the sort of rare soul and... More >>
• BEST INDEPENDENT THEATER
  15 Head productions can sometimes be cold: Most of the performers in the company's staging of The Insatiate Countess wore their faces frozen in masklike expressions and moved with near-clinical calculation. So this is not theater oriented toward audiences looking for the experience that... More >>
• BEST JAZZ RADIO PROGRAM
  If jazz is dead--or safe, or in the monopolistic possession of Ken Burns--no one has told Fresh Ears host Richard Paske. Even among the impassioned and obsessive DJs at KFAI, he's something of a maverick and a fanatic. You can usually tell when you've come across Paske's show even without... More >>
• BEST LOCAL IMPRESARIO
  The Minnesota Fringe Festival continues to grow like that pinkish gelatin that terrorized Steve McQueen in The Blob: This past year's festival featured 104 shows in 17 different venues, seeping through the walls and floorboards of every possible performing surface (including some decidedly... More >>
• BEST MOVIE THEATER
  Our beloved local museum of the moving image went above and beyond its retro roots this past year by playing host to the two greatest films of 2000, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flowers of Shanghai and Edward Yang's Yi Yi (A One and a Two...)--both from Taiwan, both unspeakably beautiful, and both... More >>
• BEST MUSEUM
  The Minnesota Historical Society is a wise old uncle of a museum, sitting on the back porch watching the world pass by. After all, the society, which predates Minnesota's acceptance into the Union by a good nine years, has pretty much seen it all--from fur trappers and log rollers to railroad... More >>
• BEST MUSEUM EXHIBITION
  This past fall, the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program (MAEP) mounted "An Acre of Art," an exhibition of the rural-based work of Mark Knierim and Robert Lawrence in the Minnesota Artists' Gallery at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. It was a perfect way to end the year--a spare and elegant... More >>
• BEST MUSIC WEBZINE
  If you're a music fan, the information available from the Web's compulsive catalogers can be mighty useful. Sometimes you do need to know every tour date the Minutemen played in 1985, the index numbers for every release on the ESP label, or the guitar tabs for that Yo La Tengo song you keep... More >>
• BEST NEW ART TREND
  Much like the fin-de-siècle Ottoman Empire, today's art world is stagnant and unproductive, a victim of the bloated success at the upper echelons (Manhattan's art scene being a distant and inaccessible sultan's palace, so to speak). Fortunately for the Ottomans, a collection of... More >>
• BEST OBSCURE MUSEUM
  As a child growing up in Minneapolis in the 1930s, Earl Bakken was fascinated by electricity. Ensconced in the family garage, he invented all sorts of odd contraptions that relied on battery power to turn levers and cranks, creating bright arcs of light that wowed neighboring kids and his... More >>
• BEST OPERA
  A few years back the Houston Grand Opera put its production of Kurt Weill's Street Scene up for sale. The folks over at the Minnesota Opera, who had long wanted to perform the piece, couldn't have been more delighted and quickly snapped up the sets and costumes. The production staff restored... More >>
• BEST PIRATE RADIO STATION
  Since relocating last winter to yet another freezing shed somewhere in south Minneapolis, Free Radio Twin Cities has had a good run, for an operation that's been on the lam. "The black cat of the FM dial" was named best pirate radio station by this paper one year ago; it has since boosted its... More >>
• BEST PUBLIC ART PROJECT
  If you spent any time on Lake Street this past summer, you were part of photographer Wing Young Huie's six-mile-long ode to the Twin Cities' most diverse artery. Perhaps you stopped to admire one of the black-and-white photos placed in storefront windows along Lake Street--images of drifters,... More >>
• BEST PUBLIC-ACCESS CABLE TV SHOW
  How to pick just one when there are so many to love? Who knows what you'll find flipping through the channels? The nobrow camp of Joanie Loves Furbies? The tawdry thrills of Thomasina.com? Murky, incomprehensible recordings of poorly written sketch comedy? Wedding videos? That freaky Dr.... More >>
• BEST RADIO STATION
  There is a sound that, next to "dead air," is assumed to be the least ratings-friendly noise you can imagine on the radio: people speaking in a foreign language. If listeners can't understand what's being said, goes the logic, they'll tune out faster than our president at a Korean peace summit.... More >>
• BEST SINGLE-ARTIST SHOW
  The best art effortlessly captures something about the spirit of its age. It does not try to be contemporary; it simply is, by virtue of its timely essence. Shannon Kennedy's October 2000 show at Franklin Art Works, in which she presented "Untitled #3," a single seven-minute video projected in... More >>
• BEST SPORTS TALK RADIO HOST
  Since arriving on the Twin Cities radio scene with an evening sports talk show on the FAN in 1994, Dan "The Common Man" Cole has slowly but steadily built his following. Nowadays, his listeners proudly refer to themselves as members of "the Commonwealth." The guy just has a way of growing on... More >>
• BEST STAGE PRODUCTION
  Jacques Lecoq, Jacques Lecoq--sometimes it doesn't seem like a week goes by that we don't hear about another theater taking its inspiration from this French educator. Who would have expected he would have so profound an influence on the Twin Cities? But in the world of physical theater, there... More >>
• BEST THEATER FOR COMEDY
  Comedy is pretty mobile in the Twin Cities. Let us take as an example comedian/storyteller Ari Hoptman, who has in the past year performed at the Bryant-Lake Bowl, Intermedia Arts, the Phoenix Playhouse, a Minneapolis church, and Berlin. One suspects that if there were no venue at all, Hoptman... More >>
• BEST THEATER FOR DRAMA
  Do we take this quarter-century-old theater for granted? We do, don't we? Nowadays, when directors frequently cast plays without regard to color (and sometimes gender), and when most local theater companies produce several plays per season that tell stories of diverse ethnic and cultural... More >>
• BEST THEATER FOR NEW WORK
  We're talking really new work here. The ink may have dried on the pages of the scripts that rotate through the Playwrights' Center's various educational programs and workshops, but the photocopies are still warm and smell of toner. A random sampling of one week in the center's calendar reveals... More >>
• BEST TV NEWSCASTER
  Julie Nelson's rise to the top slot at KSTP sure was quick. After a two-year stint at Louisville's WAVE, Nelson arrived at Channel 5 in the summer of 1998 with little fanfare, initially anchoring the dreaded 5:30 to 7:00 a.m. morning show. Barely a year later, she was regularly filling in for... More >>
• BEST TV SPORTS ANCHOR
  Sure, he's a blowhard. But tell us, what sportscaster isn't? Schmit is the King of the Blowhards for two reasons. First, his Sunday-night show, Sports Wrap, is the best of the bunch. It features the usual stew of plays of the week, game recaps, and insipid banter. Yet Schmit also sneaks in some... More >>
• BEST TV STATION
  As anyone who watched Survivor knows, the term Reality TV is more than a little misleading. Think about it: A deep-pocketed production company carefully screen-tests hundreds of applicants, cherry-picks the most telegenic of the lot, inserts them into elaborately contrived situations in exotic... More >>
• BEST TV WEATHERPERSON
  When he steps out into the KARE-11 Backyard, he's immediately reassuring--even if he's about to proclaim another record-cold evening or an anticipated 14-inch snowfall. Is it the quirky, crooked smile? The way he looks so suave in that winter overcoat? The mellifluous voice that predicts... More >>
• BEST WRITER AT A LOCAL DAILY
  "Kaiser carried his shotgun everywhere. Sometimes at night, the priest who jumped out of airplanes, stitched his own leg after a motorcycle accident and stalked caped buffalo, called out in his troubled sleep." So ended the third installment of Pi Press reporter Charles Laszewski's series... More >>
• BEST-DRESSED TV NEWSCASTER
  Those piercing eyes, that elegantly coiffed hair, that chiseled bone structure--Paul Magers would be the hottest local broadcaster even if he joined co-anchor Diana Pierce in selecting a wardrobe off the T.J. Maxx clearance rack. But it's the suit, that mini-houndstooth check paired with the... More >>