Arts & Entertainment >>

• Readers' Poll Winners
  Best Comedian/ Comedy Troupe Killing My Lobster Best Writer Dave Eggers Best Local Rock Band Flexx Bronco Best Rapper E-40 Best Radio Station KFOG Best Radio Morning Crew Fernando and Greg, 92.7 FM Best Music Festival Outside Lands Best Place to See Live Music The Fillmore Best Drag... More >>
• Best New Music Fest
  Outside Lands
  Last summer, those who attended the first annual Outside Lands music festival in Golden Gate Park were treated to many "only in San Francisco" moments. There was the night Radiohead performed dreamy postrock symphonies, shrouded in fog. Or the time indie songwriter Bon Iver got the entire crowd... More >>
• Best New Psych Band
  Sleepy Sun
  The ghosts of Haight Street's acid freaks continue to spike the drinking water of our hometown music community. You can't peruse KUSF's local top 10 list without hitting at least one band that caters to a psychedelic mentality. Most of these groups trip on high volume, heavy drone, and brute... More >>
• Best New Synth-Rockers
  Maus Haus
  Formed in February 2008 by members of such local bands as Social Studies, Battlehooch, and Pope of Yes, Maus Haus steals synth-rock away from the '80s-minded indie-rockers and makes it weird all over again. Think of '60s freaks like the Silver Apples and the United States of America, groups that... More >>
• Best Chance at Being the Next Vampire Weekend
  The Morning Benders
  New York City band Vampire Weekend seemed an unlikely buzz band, considering how its members play nice, innocuous pop tunes while sporting sweaters and preppy haircuts. And yet it quickly became huge, selling out large venues like Mezzanine and playing prime slots at festivals. The Morning... More >>
• Best Beach Boys Worshippers
  AB & the Sea
  Back in the early '60s, everyone wanted to be a Beach Boy — driving a woody, riding the waves, playing that twangy, fuzzed-out surf-rock. Well, that dream still lives on, although the whole "sand in the shorts" thing has gone out of fashion. Nowadays, bands like Grizzly Bear, the... More >>
• Best Indie Music Genius
  John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees
  In every city, there's usually one musician defining the epicenter of a scene. In San Francisco, that person is John Dwyer, who can be counted on to stir a wild, art-damaged ruckus no matter the band. He has held the title of S.F.'s sultan of spazz for nearly a decade, starting with his stint in... More >>
• Best Punk Rock Conductor
  John Gluck
  As conductor of S.F.'s Punk Rock Orchestra, John Gluck eschews Bach, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Haydn, and Mozart to guide as many as 50 players through what they consider the real classics: irrepressible punk jams from bands like Suicidal Tendencies, the Clash, Dead Kennedys, Joy Division, and... More >>
• Best Free Classical Concerts
  San Francisco Chamber Orchestra
  San Francisco Chamber Orchestra concerts induce uneasiness in the hearts of the jaded and the cynical. After all, they feature world-class players, renowned guest musicians, and top venues, at no cost whatsoever. There's gotta be a catch, right? Will we be pitched for a timeshare? Are we being... More >>
• Best Late-Night Movie Series
  Midnites for Maniacs at the Castro
  “Even the past isn’t worth living in,” snarled Graham Parker on his blistering 1980 record The Up Escalator. He was right, of course, which makes us respect the remarkable sacrifice of Jesse Hawthorne Ficks that much more. The genial but obsessive movie hound behind the regular Midnites... More >>
• Best New Online Animated Variety Show (1 Comment)
  Forest City Rockers
  Artist Jay Howell is mostly known for his boners. Not the tents he pops in his own pants, but rather those he procures in his wildly silly (and popular) watercolor paintings of men gone wild. For his latest venture, animated variety show Forest City Rockers, Howell keeps their lower halves... More >>
• Best Comedian
  Ali Wong
  Comedians are often ambitious egotists with poor boundaries who aren't hiding how intelligent they are. Ali Wong is all of that, plus she has the things that really matter: wit, timing, experience, and a unique hairdo. We're so proud of her! She delighted and embarrassed fellow comedian Bobby... More >>
• Best Drummer
  Warren Huegel
  Internationally known and locally respected, Warren Huegel is in demand for his anchoring beat. As a member of S.F.–based band Tussle, which he left earlier this year, he effortlessly rode the line between introspective psychedelic rock and extroverted electronic dance music. He currently... More >>
• Liveliest Reading Series
  Literary Death Match
  San Francisco is a city of readers, and therefore of reading serieses. With so many events to choose from, each happening needs to set itself apart. Porchlight offers real-life storytelling, Writers with Drinks skews toward the naughty and offbeat, Lit & Lunch presents translated classics... More >>
• Best Video Magazine
  Wholphin
  When Wholphin, a creation of the McSweeney's folks, celebrated its most recent quarterly DVD compilation at Artists' Television Access earlier this year, the audience was happily wedged into the theater. The selections were all standard Wholphin fare: witty, connected to someone interesting and... More >>
• Best Place to Meet a Future Oscar Nominee
  Rough Cuts at the Lab
  The Convention and Visitors Bureau (or maybe it was professional salesman Willie Brown) dubbed our burg Hollywood North, but the moniker didn't stick. See, S.F.'s claim to film fame isn't big-budget, star-powered movies (Vertigo and The Conversation notwithstanding) but a steady torrent of... More >>
• Best Cheap Date
  Dolores Park Movie Night
  Volunteer-run, donation-funded, and totally free, Dolores Park Movie Night, while fully permitted, has the raucous feel of a guerrilla screening. The series runs April through October on the second Thursday of the month. Organizers show an awesome array of shlock and high-brow, from Jaws 3D to... More >>
• Best New Silent Filmmaker
  Nara Denning
  We're still excited about Nara Denning, even though it's been months since we first saw her dense and glossy films. A finalist in SF Weekly's Masterminds contest earlier this year, she reminds us of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin (best known for The Saddest Music in the World) for her use of the... More >>
• Best Local Documentary Filmmaker
  Sam Green
  The defining characteristic of the successful narrative filmmaker is ego; for a documentary maker, it's soul. Sam Green evinced a deep well of the stuff with his 1997 debut, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, an unexpectedly compassionate portrait of wacked-out born-again television personality "Rock... More >>
• Best Dyke Porn Studio
  Pink and White
  Tucked among the quiet streets of Bernal Heights, nothing gives away the house that's home to Pink and White Productions, the indie porn studio that has put out multiple critically acclaimed, award-winning, girl-on-girl features like The Crash Pad and Superfreak. Specifically, it's home to... More >>
• Sexiest Street Fair
  Up Your Alley
  The Folsom Street Fair will always be the nipple-clamped granddaddy of fetish festivals. But for every bona fide leather aficionado who struts over to Folsom each September, you get at least five East Bay gawkers who have no real desire to participate in, say, a friendly game of Jockstrap... More >>
• Best Queer Bingo Night
  Sisters Bingo
  Think bingo is just a social outlet for dauber-wielding geriatrics? Honey, please. On the third Wednesday of each month from 7 to 10 p.m., San Francisco's favorite queer nuns, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, host a bingo night that requires a keen appreciation of the eccentric. With themes... More >>
• Best Reason to Try to Look Like Burt Reynolds
  Mustaches for Kids
  Growing a mustache because it looks cool makes you a chump. Cultivating a nostril mat for the benefit of children makes you a champ. San Francisco has a long list of bleeding-heart causes, but none is as much fun as Mustaches for Kids. The nationwide fundraiser encourages an influx of third... More >>
• Best New Art Gallery
  Baer Ridgway
  When Kent Baer and Eli Ridgway went looking for a spot for their art gallery, the economy was winding down. By last August, when they'd negotiated a lease on a former restaurant storage space in the alley next to SFMOMA, their opening was timed just about right to coincide with the bust. Despite... More >>
• Best Unique Art Gallery
  Creativity Explored
  Art, schmart! Creativity Explored demolishes gallery boilerplates by virtue of making art a tactile language accessible to everyone. The nonprofit features professional artists with developmental disabilities, ranging in age from 20 to 80, who create more than your typical morbid abstractions... More >>
• Best Flash Mob Event
  Valentine's Day Pillow Fight
  The year 2009 will live in infamy as the time when city officials at last began pushing back against one of S.F.'s most beloved genres of civic pastime — the flash mob event. These offbeat get-togethers, organized with the help of local bloggers and Web sites, include no-pants subway rides... More >>
• Best Artmaking Event
  Monster Drawing Rally
  The Monster Drawing Rally is an annual benefit for Southern Exposure, a nonprofit art gallery, and it consists of audiences watching artists make art, live. Four hour-long sessions find four groups of artists seated at tables arranged in a ring. You walk around them, voyeuristically witnessing a... More >>
• Best Spook Exhibitor
  Trevor Paglen
  Many of the darkest secrets about the U.S. military's post-9/11 covert operations remain hidden from view. But photographer Trevor Paglen aims to unearth them, one art exhibition at a time. Two years ago at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, he produced passport images of CIA agents who... More >>
• Best Local TV Station
  KOFY-TV
  Bone-crunching roller derby matches. Mork & Mindy reruns. Eccentric house ads starring a rotating cast of dogs. If this sampling of programming seems too much to ask of television in the age of MSNBC and the Oxygen channel, think again. Last October, KOFY reclaimed the mantle of the Bay... More >>
• Best Broadcast Alternative to Cocaine
  Energy 92.7 (Pure Dance)
  It's about time we came out to the world about our hidden passion for perhaps the gayest thing in San Francisco — its gay dance radio station, 92.7. Basically, we listen to Energy 92.7 in our cars and our apartments and at the office and in the shower. We listen while eating edamame,... More >>
• Best Radio DJ
  Stereo Steve, KUSF (90.3 FM)
  Fridays were made for loosening up the brain stem from its gnarled roots in the work week. Every Friday from noon until 3 p.m. (at which time he co-hosts the guest DJ hour), Stereo Steve takes over the independent airwaves and pilots a sonic vacation far away from formulaic rock song structures.... More >>
• Best Rogue Radio Station
  Pirate Cat Radio (87.9 FM)
  Pirate Cat Radio is an unlicensed low-wattage radio station that has managed to continue broadcasting for more than 10 years despite persistent threats by the Federal Communications Commission to pull the plug. According to a 2007 story in the San Jose Mercury News, Pirate Cat founder Daniel... More >>
• Best Theater Company
  Sleepwalkers
  Some people like their theater as polished as possible. Others like it scrappy. Sleepwalkers is definitely for the latter crowd: The company specializes in no-frills productions of rough-and-tumble new plays. In its adopted space at the Phoenix Theatre, Sleepwalkers cultivates a slacker vibe... More >>
• Best Stage Director
  Amy Glazer
  Directing new or little-known plays can be an awfully thankless task. Even in San Francisco, a lot of season subscribers are perfectly content with yet another production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Amy Glazer makes a point of delivering thoughtful productions of well-written,... More >>
• Best Theatrical Act of Political Defiance
  Theatre Rhino
  The debacle surrounding Proposition 8 — the state's Constitutional ban on same-sex marriage — particularly outraged the local performing arts community, many of whose members are gay. After the election, Theatre Rhino, America's longest-running queer theater company, declared itself... More >>
• Best Onstage Male Nudity
  Encore Theatre
  From veteran performance artist Karen Finley writhing around naked in chocolate sauce in her iconoclastic solo shows to Nicole Kidman's brief nude scene in David Hare's 1998 drama The Blue Room, the "serious" theater has long been a repository for onstage female nudity. Despite the popularity of... More >>
• Best One-Man-Band Theater
  The Marsh
  Since the 1980s, San Francisco has been a hive for solo performance. Thanks to the ruggedly individualistic local landscape and opportunities provided by the likes of the Climate Theater, the Exit Theatre, and the sadly defunct Solo Mio Festival, the Bay Area has played an instrumental role in... More >>
• Best Dance Company
  Presidio Dance Theatre
  Dance habitués who like their movement with an international flavor needn't rely on the annual Ethnic Dance Festival alone to feed their fancy. Presidio Dance Theatre has effortlessly employed a global aesthetic for the more than 100 productions in its repertory. That means moves specific... More >>
• Best Burlesque Revue
  Hubba Hubba Revue
  Pasties, booze, and pretty girls (and bois) thumbing their noses at propriety? Sounds like a party to us. For more than three years, the Hubba Hubba Revue has been upstaging more coquettish burlesque acts with a tasty goulash of live bands, classic striptease, vaudeville high-jinks, and Weimar... More >>
• Best Free Flamenco Show
  The Flamenco Room at ThirstyBear
  Dilemma: The weekend is coming to its inevitable close, you'd like to fit in one last bit of revelry before Monday, but your wallet is feeling the damage from the past two days. Solution: Pop a squat at the ThirstyBear for the flamenco shows each Sunday at 7:15 and 8:30 p.m. Dancer Kerensa... More >>
• Best Food-Friendly Theater
  The Exit Theatreplex
  In a country where most performing arts venues won't sell you an alcoholic beverage, let alone let you bring it into the auditorium, the Exit Theatre's cafe space is a modest yet wonderful bastion of hospitality. Located in the heart of the Tenderloin in the same building as two of the Exit's... More >>
• Best S.F. Science Fiction Movies
  Invasion of the Body Snatchers|It Came from Beneath the Sea|Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home|THX 1138
  San Francisco has been a peerlessly photogenic setting for thrillers, Westerns, disaster flicks, romantic comedies, war movies, and even musicals, but our cinematic self has also played host to intergalactic aliens, atomic mutants, visitors from the future, and other FX-enabled fantasy... More >>