The Ursa Major Awards have always been a popular-vote award with no pretense of consideration for artistic or literary merit. This has been announced since 2001, so I don't know what you mean by "that's finally an admission that the UMA honors the most popular work of the year".
It's not exactly a secret that if the ALAA administrators could have thrown out the nominations and votes in 2009 for "Avatar" on the grounds that Big, Blue Aliens are not anthropomorphic animals, and given the award to the stop-motion "Fantastic Mr. Fox" instead, we would have done so. But "Avatar" was the clear favorite with the voters.
The Ursa Major Awards have always been a popular-vote award with no pretense of consideration for artistic or literary merit. This has been announced since 2001, so I don't know what you mean by "that's finally an admission that the UMA honors the most popular work of the year".
It's not exactly a secret that if the ALAA administrators could have thrown out the nominations and votes in 2009 for "Avatar" on the grounds that Big, Blue Aliens are not anthropomorphic animals, and given the award to the stop-motion "Fantastic Mr. Fox" instead, we would have done so. But "Avatar" was the clear favorite with the voters.
Fred Patten