Ahoy!!

So finally I think I came up with a process to have our own awards ceremony here in Karma. Surely you've all seen by now the posts by Captain Peceno; I think its a great idea because it symbolizes the faith the community has in itself. Getting an award from any anonymous body of critics is something, but having filmmakers who know you well and know your work and know eachother.. decide amongst themselves that you are to be awarded amongst them, well, that's something else. Its a Peer Award, actually, and its great validation.

I don't think we can afford to offer any real prize, other than the symbolic pride of knowing you were chosen by your bucaneer brethren, to know you're admired, respected and appreciated.

Hence, I needed a very fair process. I discarded a single-voting poll, because I imagined everyone would earn a vote or two, and the winner would be the one with three or four votes. Not really representative of what the majority thinks. In order to have a majority or a plurality, there needed to be few nominees, but if I just decreed who the nominees are out of the blue, it  would (rightly) smack of favoritism. 

So here's the next best thing, we're going to do this in 4 stages over the course of a month:

Stage 1, "NOMINATION" begins right now. In Stage 1, I'm looking for people to nominate other people to receive our award, in the following categories: "Best Filmmaker", "Best Director", "Best Writer". Please comment in this post, and state the names of the persons you're nominating, and for which category. Each person can only nominate one other person per category, not including him/herself.

This way, we can't have a single person nominating 20 persons, and we can't have 20 persons all nominating themselves :) So, once again: please comment in this post, and state the names of three people you'd like to see awarded, one per category (Filmmaker, Director, Writer). You can nominate the same person for all three categories if you want, but you can't nominate yourself, cuz that would look funny :)

Stage 2, "SECOND BEST" is exactly the same as Stage 1, except with one difference: you're not allowed to vote for your nominees. You -have- to vote for someone else, hence the name "Second Best". Why? Because otherwise it would be an exact repeat of Stage 1! One half of all nominees will be eliminated at the end of this stage, according to votes.

Stage 3, "RUNNING MATES" is exactly the same as Stage 1, with one difference: you get to vote twice in each category. So, if in Stage 1 you only had one vote per category and you gave it to your nominee, and in Stage 1 you still had one vote per category and you gave it to the Second Best, in this stage you have 2 votes per category, and you can give them to whoever you want, assuming they haven't been eliminated yet. The only thing you can't do is give both votes to the same person. All nominees will be eliminated at this point, except for three in each category.

Stage 4, "CORONATION" will simply be one poll per category, each with its three finalists. Easy as pie!

Since each stage lasts a week, we should have our Best Filmmaker, Best Director and Best Writer in a month!

How does this sound? Complicated, I know. Lol. I know. I'm just trying to make something fair where the winner truly gets a significant number of votes, a plurality, or at least a majority, and therefore the award is meaningful.

I will re-post the instructions as clearly as possible at the beginning of each stage.

Alas, Stage 1 begins right now, and here are the instructions:

P.S. Anyone has any ideas for the name of our Award? I like "Golden Pirate" but in filmmaking terms, it sounds like movie piracy, hehehe! And this award may end up in someone's resume, so it needs to be something industry-friendly. Any other ideas?