Sci-Fi Storm

The 2002 Golden Globe Award nominations have been announced, and Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring picked up 4 in the Motion Picture categories: Best Drama, Best Director (Peter Jackson), Best Original Score (Howard Shore), and Best Original Song (“May It Be”). Shrek got Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy, and A.I. is up for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama (Jude Law), Best Director (Steven Spielberg), and Best Original Score (John Williams).

On New Years Day, [asin=B00005JKEX]The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension DVD[/asin] will be released. Producer/Director W.D. Richter said in an interview that the DVD fixes some flaws, and “We’ve done our best to jam a lot of strange special features in there. We’ve gone to Buckaroo lengths to keep this conceit going that Buckaroo’s real, and that the [Banzai] Institute is authorizing the DVD.” [asin=B00005JKEX]Pre-order yours today[/asin].

JMS told SCI FI Wire he thinks “Warner [Brothers] to some degree wants to test the waters to determine if there was enough interest in the show to release it on DVD,” but [asin=B00005NTNP]In the Beginning/The Gathering[/asin] were not his first choices. Follow the link for more…

The American Film Institute has announced the nominees for the 2001 AFI Awards, and several genre movies get the nod, including Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (including Movie of the Year), A.I., and Shrek. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer is nominated for Drama of the Year.

George Lucas has put a number of items from the Star Wars movies up for auction on eBay to benefit the Auction for America. Items include Darth Maul’s stunt lightsaber, a Stormtrooper helmet, Darth Vader mask, and a number of models built by ILM. Get ready to bust those credit limits…

Fox Home Entertainment has announced that the entire first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will be released next month, currnetly January 15th. Thus we’ve given Buffy her own spot in the Sci-Fi TV Store.

George Lucas, in an interview with Post Magazine (and scooped by Dark Horizons) said that it will take time to release DVDs of the first three movies, mostly because of the lack of materials to put together to make it a special release. A lost of stuff “just didn’t exist in those days,” Lucas said. Maybe they can scrape up the deleted Biggs scenes.

The Into the Fires Auction has a number of items signed by Babylon 5 actors (and a few others such as Virginia Hey of Farscape up for auction to support a number of charities, including Pat Tallman’s Penny Lane. Items include March of Dimes beanies and cartoons from Tye Bourdony of The Lighter Side of Sci-Fi.

The official Star Wars site has announced that Lucas Online will cease hosting fans.starwars.com, which hosted tons of sanctioned fan websites, originally set up in March of 2000. I’m guessing it got too expensive for Lucas to foot the bill. Note that they are not killing the web sites themselves – as long as they continue to comply with the sanctioning agreement, they can host their site anywhere.

Just a reminder: the third Techno-Mage novel by our friend Jeanne Cavelos, [asin=0345438337]Invoking Darkness[/asin], is out today, and the first Babylon 5 DVD, [asin=B00005NTNP]In the Beginning/The Gathering[/asin], is due out in the US next Tuesday, December 4th – and word is from other regions where it is already out is that it is great. Follow the links to order them today from Amazon.com, or head over to the Babylon 5 Store for more goodies. And a thanks to all of you who have already ordered…