Genre fare is hard to find in this year’s Academy Award nominations, at least compared to such mainstream fare as Walk The Line, Munich, Memoirs Of A Geisha, Capote, and the movie many anticipated would be a hot Oscar prospect, Brokeback Mountain. Here are the categories where genre films did make a showing.

• Best Animated Feature: Howl’s Moving Castle, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, Wallace & Gromit in The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit
• Art Direction: Good Night, And Good Luck, Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, King Kong, Memoirs Of A Geisha, Pride & Prejudice
• Cinematography: Batman Begins, Brokeback Mountain, Good Night, And Good Luck, Memoirs Of A Geisha, The New World
• Costume Design: Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Memoirs Of A Geisha, Mrs. Henderson Presents, Pride & Prejudice, Walk The Line
• Makeup: The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, Cinderella Man, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith
• Sound Editing: King Kong, Memoirs Of A Geisha, War Of The Worlds
• Sound Mixing: The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, King Kong, Memoirs Of A Geisha, Walk The Line, War Of The Worlds
• Visual Effects: The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, King Kong, War Of The Worlds

Source: Oscar.com

The BBC has announced that its next two Doctor Who DVD releases in the UK after The Beginning box set (which ships on Monday) will be the Tom Baker classic Genesis Of The Daleks (March) and the epic 7-part finale of Jon Pertwee’s first season as the Doctor, Inferno (May). Genesis will feature commentary by series stars Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen, frequent-flyer guest star Peter Miles, and director David Maloney, along with a documentary on the real genesis of the Doctor’s most persistent foes. Commentary on Inferno will be provided by series regulars Nicholas “The Brigadier” Courtney and John “Sgt. Benton” Levene (recorded during one of Levene’s rare visits to the UK), along with producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks, and the 2-disc set will include an infamous deleted scene and a documentary on the creation of UNIT. (Keep in mind, these are the UK release dates only; they’ll probably appear in North America later this year.)
Source: BBC

Lost won. The cast of Lost took home the Screen Actors’ Guild Award trophy for best ensemble cast in a drama series; the formidable contenders for that award were Grey’s Anatomy, Six Feet Under, The West Wing and The Closer. On a slightly-genre-related note, Invasion regular William Fichtner was a member of the cast of Crash, which took home the award for the best motion picture ensemble cast.

B’Elanna gets Lost too. Roxann Dawson, formerly Star Trek: Voyager’s B’Elanna Torres, has forged quite a directing career for herself with episodes of series such as Charmed; she has also now directed the Lost episode The Long Con, scheduled to air on February 8th.

Experience required? Following the recent split of Viacom/Paramount and CBS into two separate entities under the same umbrella, Paramount’s theme parks are up for sale, including Star Trek: The Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton and several theme parks in the U.S. and Canada. CBS president Les Moonves has been quoted as saying that the parks no longer fit in with the network’s business model. The parks did $1.1 billion in business last year.

Who’s On First? theLogBook.com’s intrepid (and rather sneaky) Mark Holtz has gazed into the future of SciFi.com’s schedulebot and confirmed the first airdate and time for the U.S. premiere of the new Doctor Who. The first episode, Rose, will air at 9 PM and midnight (Eastern and Pacific time) on March 17, with an 11 PM repeat on Sunday. Rose repeats at 8 PM on March 24th immediately before the second episode, The End Of The World. The network’s website also now has a link for a Doctor Who page, but at the time of this writing the link leads nowhere.

Star Wars alumnus Ewan McGregor is just one of many famous voices who’ll be heard on the upcoming Rhino CD Unexpected Dreams: Songs From The Stars, due in March. The disc benefits music programs sponsored by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. McGregor sings Sade’s “The Greatest Gift,” Alias star Jennifer Garner sings “My Heart Is So Full Of You” (and her co-star, Victor Garber, croons Sondheim’s “No One Is Alone”), Teri Hatcher (Lois & Clark, Desperate Housewives) performs the Beatles’ “Goodnight,” and Xena goes musical again as Lucy Lawless adds her voice to “Little Child.” Other celebrities adding their talents to Unexpected Dreams include Scarlet Johansson, Jeremy Irons, John Stamos, Nia Vardalos, Eric McCormack and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The CD hits shelves on March 28th.
Source: Rhino Records

January 26th marks NASA’s official Day of Remembrance, a solemn day memorializing astronauts who died in the service of space exploration. Observed on the 26th of January, the Day of Remembrance is immediately followed by the anniversaries of two NASA tragedies; on January 27th, 1967, the crew of the projected Apollo 1 flight – Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee – died during a ground test due to an accidental fire in the crew cabin’s 100% oxygen atmosphere, . The investigation into that fire kept American astronauts on the ground until the middle of the following year, but resulted in a safer, more functional Apollo spacecraft. And twenty years ago this year on January 28th, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, killing its crew of seven instantly, when a leak in a safety seal on a solid booster rocket allowed its flame exhaust to eat into the skin of the external tank containing flammable hydrogen. There was not another American shuttle launch until the summer of 1987. February 1st will mark the second anniversary of the destruction of space shuttle Columbia and the death of her seven crew members during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. One shuttle flight has lifted off since the Columbia disaster, though NASA engineers are still working on refits and tighter safety guidelines before they’ll commit to another.
Source: NASA

In a multi-billion dollar deal that Disney bosses no doubt hope will boost the studio’s flagging animation output, Disney has bought Pixar for a reported $7.4 billion. The sale also puts Pixar’s Steve Jobs (who rose to fame when he co-founded Apple Computer in the 1970s) on the Disney board of directors. Despite raking in huge box office numbers with such Pixar-produced movies as Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, a rift formed between the two companies toward the end of the reign of former Disney president Michael Eisner. With Robert Iger now at the helm, Disney decided to make its relationship with Pixar more permanent; Pixar’s executive VP John Lasseter, one of the company’s creative guiding lights, also moves up to become the head of Disney’s overall animation operations.
Sources: BBC, Reuters

Another planet has been found orbiting a distant star, and this one is the smaller one found to date. OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, as it has been designated, revolves around a red dwarf star in an orbit that takes it roughly ten Earth years to complete. But what makes this find significant is that, at five times Earth’s diameter, the planet is the smallest one astronomers have spotted from Earth. With an estimated surface temperature of -364 degrees Fahrenheit, OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb is probably just a little bit too nippy for life to have formed there, but it’s a promising find as the search continues for smaller bodies in orbits that could be favorable to the formation of life. The planet is also within the Milky Way galaxy, closer to the galactic center than the spiral arm in which Earth’s sun resides.
Source: BBC

Remember the Dumont Network and all of its great programming? No? It’s about to have company in the “dead broadcast network” department, because it was announced today that UPN and the WB are both calling it quits this fall after 11 years of struggling to make a dent against the “big four” networks. (Both networks signed on in January 1995, the WB premiering its programming one week before UPN went on the air with the premiere of Star Trek: Voyager.) However, some of their programming may survive to be seen on a new joint venture between Warner Bros. and UPN’s parent network, CBS. This new network, “The CW,” will have programming and personnel held over from both defunct networks. It’s not known as yet how the merger will affect the lifespans of such genre programming as Smallville, Charmed or the WB’s in-development Aquaman series, or even how the situation will work out in broadcast markets where affiliate stations exist for both networks.
Source: Associated Press

If you’re a Lost fan who likes occasionally getting an episode with extra minutes of story, this is good news for you; if you’re an Invasion fan who’s getting paranoid about Lost encroaching on your show’s running time like a bunch of aquatic bodysnatchers, not so much. It appears that this week’s episode of Lost will run one whole minute longer than usual, and accordingly, Invasion will begin one minute later. Also, during the week of January 30th, both shows will be airing repeats (Season 1′s Numbers for Lost and The Cradle installment of Invasion), as will most ABC series that week as the network saves its new episodes for after the Winter Olympics (airing on NBC).

If, between Veronica Mars and Battlestar Galactica, you’re still not getting enough Lucy Lawless-based entertainment, a fan letter-writing campaign is underway to convince Universal Studios to get a Xena feature film project in the pipeline. With a little guidance from Xena TV producer Rob Tapert (who also happens to be Lucy’s husband), fans are being pointed in the direction of the person they need to write letters to, and a printable postcard design is even on display.

Xena: The Movie Campaign

Despite being announced as an upcoming title for the Atari 2600 by Coleco in 1982, a home version of the arcade game (seen here) Ladybug has never surfaced for the 2600, and while quite a few games that were programmed and never released back in the day have since been excavated, Ladybug isn’t one of them. Now programmer John W. Champeau has made it his mission to finish the job that Coleco couldn’t, and finally put Ladybug on the 2600 with as many of the arcade game’s bells and whistles as he can squeeze into a handful of kilobytes. He’s chronicling his attempt to create a homebrew Ladybug at AtariAge.com, where you can check on his progress. (If you need to refresh your memory about the original coin-op, see our Phosphor Dot Fossils retrospective on it here, or see video of the game being played here.)
Source: AtariAge.com

Voice artist Billy West (Futurama, Ren & Stimpy) has sounded the alarm Futurama fans have been waiting for – 20th Century Fox is preparing to go into production on a series of four feature-length direct-to-DVD movies, featuring the original voice cast. There’s no official word yet on a release schedule, but a note posted by West in his forums says that the recording sessions will begin in July or August of 2006.
Source: TVshowsonDVD.com

According to a report on Gateworld.net, the much-anticipated PC game Stargate SG-1: The Alliance is almost certainly stillborn. The game’s developer has begun laying off staff after releasing a statement that MGM is “sitting on its hands” where the rights to release the game through another publisher are concerned. The team-based first-person shooter game was originally due out last fall, but a rift between Perception and the original publisher, JoWood, halted the release schedule. (It’s possible that, with Richard Dean Anderson no longer associated with the series, a game which heavily features his voice and likeness has passed its sell-by date.) There’s no word on whether The Alliance might be revived in some other form for the new generation of game consoles.
Source: Gateworld.net

In the BBC’s recent Best Of 2005 poll, giving viewers to vote for their favorite BBC shows in several categories, Doctor Who swept the Drama categories: Best Drama, a Best Actor win for Christopher Eccleston (with new Who David Tenant hot on his heels at #2), Best Actress for Billie Piper, and an almost complete sweep of the “Most Desirable Star” category, with Billie Piper again placing at #1, Tenant at #2, Eccleston at #3, and John “Captain Jack” Barrowman at #4. Doctor Who also landed the award for Best Drama Website, and two of the Best Villain slots – the Daleks came in at #1, with their boss, the Emperor Dalek, at #5. However, genre fans may want to keep their eyes on another show which showed up in many of the same categories. Starting this week on PBS in America, the period drama Bleak House came in at #2 for Best Drama, and its star, Gillian Anderson (formerly of The X-Files), came in right behind Billie as the #2 choice for Best Actress, and #5 in the otherwise Who-loaded Most Desirable Star category. (Anderson’s Bleak House co-star, Anna Maxwell Martin, was the #3 choice for Best Actress, and also guest starred as Suki in last year’s Doctor Who episode The Long Game.) Another familiar face coming in at #4 in the Best Actor category might be familiar to genre viewers – Denis Lawson, known to Star Wars fans as unflappable X-Wing pilot Wedge Antilles (and as Ewan McGregor’s uncle), also stars in Bleak House. Check your local PBS listings for more on that series.
Source: BBC

The official Red Dwarf website has announced that the show’s final season will arrive on DVD in limited edition form in North America and Australia as well as the U.K.; the boxed set will include an exclusive pull-back action toy of the series’ hapless robotic Skutters. The U.K. Red Dwarf VIII set will hit the streets in March, while Australia gets the skutter set in April and the North America gets it in May. The three-disc set without the Skutter will also be released at the same time.

It’s official – Charmed, which seems to be in the middle of its final season on the WB, will this weekend officially become the longest running TV series with an all-female lead cast. The previous record holder was Laverne & Shirley, which will officially be surpassed as of this Sunday’s episode. In an interview with TVguide.com, executive producer Brad Kern says “the silence is deafening” when asked about a renewal from the WB. The current season’s finale is being written to wrap up the series.

NASA’s New Horizons is boldly going faster than any man-made space vehicle before it – nine hours after its launch at 2:00 PM Eastern, it surpassed the orbit of the moon and is now en route to a rendezvous with Jupiter in 13 months (normally a trip of at least two years). After grabbing a gravity assist from the giant planet, New Horizons will coast out to take the first pictures and measurements of the planet Pluto, a planet it won’t reach until 2015.

Confirming reports earlier in the week, George Takei is boldly going back to Star Trek, though in this case he’s assuming the role of Sulu for the fan film project Star Trek: New Voyages. The episode featuring Takei and Grace Lee Whitney, World Enough And Time, was actually written by Michael Reaves for the never-produced series Star Trek: Phase II, part of an abandoned attempt to start a Paramount Network in the 1970s; Phase II eventually mutated into the first Trek feature film. Reaves and Marc Scott Zicree, both of whom eventually wrote scripts for Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, rewrote the original 1970s script to suit the premise of New Voyages, and Zicree will also become the first outside director to helm a New Voyages episode. Production will begin later this year.