Arts & Entertainment >>

• Best Actress
  Martha Wilkinson
  It wasn't a prolific year for Wilkinson as far as quantity was concerned, but her brilliant performance in Tennessee Rep's production of Sweeney Todd once more stamped her as a local treasure. She's an incredibly versatile actress, and her turn as Mrs. Lovett brought lushness to a somewhat... More >>
• Best Solo Art Show
  Hunt Slonem at The Rymer Gallery
  Hunt Slonem is one of the highest-profile painters working today: He's the subject of three published books, his works have been bought for the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and his splendid lifestyle has been written up on Gawker. April's full-scale Slonem... More >>
• Best Art Crawl After-Party
  The Rabbit
  The Rabbit is a multimedia enterprise—part magazine, part social network, part event promoter—and it all amounts to possible upstart competition for the dear old Scene. In addition to the release parties for the magazine that feature bands and art installations (the latest at the... More >>
• Best Show For Art Wonks
  Chuck Close at the Frist Center
  The Frist's exhibit on Chuck Close's prints was a bit challenging for a non-artist, crammed with lots of information to wade through on every one of the many printing techniques Close has used. And he went way beyond printing, trying out every imaginable method of producing artistic multiples... More >>
• Best Duo Art Show
  Lain York and Richard Feaster at Zeitgeist
  Opening a few weeks ago, this show was one of the last we could consider for the Best of Nashville issue, but it was obvious from the promotional postcards alone that this two-painter exhibit would be a contender. With Cluttered Landscape, Lain York takes his familiar style to another level yet... More >>
• Best Going-Away Gifts
  Erika Johnson
  One of the pleasures of the Nashville art scene in recent years has been watching Erika Johnson develop as an artist. This summer she left for Pittsburgh, and celebrated her departure with a show at Twist. She filled the gallery with odds and ends she accumulated over the years as part of the... More >>
• Best Converted Tire Disposal Warehouse
  Open Lot
  Just when you thought the potential for gritty, glamorous, idealistic art environments had run out due to a lethal dose of speculation, sterile civic projects and economic desperation, a new crop of young artists has leased a tire disposal warehouse off Douglas Avenue in East Nashville,... More >>
• Best Retrospective Exhibit
  Paint Made Flesh at the Frist Center
  When Frist Center chief curator Mark Scala set out to organize the expansive figurative painting exhibit Paint Made Flesh, it's unlikely he knew he was about to score a hat trick. The challenging show attracted local audiences and media attention while simultaneously gathering kudos on a... More >>
• Best Arts Conference
  Paint Made Flesh Symposium at the Frist Center
  The Frist has added its fair share to Nashville's growing scene in the last decade, but this year's Paint Made Flesh Symposium also created a context in which to discuss and reflect on the city's best museum show of the year, and to learn about current and historical trends regarding the place... More >>
• Best New Website for Reading Local
  Humanities Tennessee's Chapter 16
  Humanities Tennessee, the fine folks who bring us the Southern Festival of Books each year, have decided to join the herd on this whole Internet thing by launching a website devoted to the literary life of the 16th state. Chapter 16 (get it?) will have reviews of new releases, author interviews... More >>
• Best Place to Study the Craft of Writing Without Threat of Pretense
  Music City Romance Writers
  The notion that a romance writers group could consist only of frustrated hausfraus is shattered when you attend a meeting of the MCRW. Granted, their gatherings are held in a retirement home, but this group, which counts genre-fiction stars J.T. Ellison and Sherrilyn Kenyon among its members,... More >>
• Best Study of Rioting in the Streets
  Clay Risen's A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination
  MBA grad and longtime Scene contributor Clay Risen, currently the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, grew up listening to his parents' recollections of the urban riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Mom and Dad's memories clearly made an... More >>
• Best Music Book by a Local Author
  Barry Mazor's Meeting Jimmie Rodgers
  Barry Mazor's Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America's Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century is not a biography of Jimmie Rodgers, it's a biography of Rodgers' music, tracing its influence through the 20th century and into the 21st. Mazor does something that too few music... More >>
• Best Socially-Conscious Classical Programming
  ALIAS Chamber Ensemble's "Emerging Voices" Series
  Since the 1980s, we've grown accustomed to hearing contemporary female composers like Joan Tower or Ellen Taaffe Zwilich represented in the classical concert hall, but the number of women composers active throughout the history of Western music may still surprise many listeners. That's why ALIAS... More >>
• Best Nashville Symphony Performance
  Ax Plays Brahms
  This February 2009 program exemplifies the Nashville Symphony's emerging status and its intriguing creative balance: The headlining hook comes from an internationally revered, Grammy-winning pianist, Emanuel Ax, playing a sterling concerto from the Old World repertoire; but the warm-up opens... More >>
• Best Premiere by a Local Composer
  Michael Alec Rose’s “Pastoral Concerto”
  To be fair, I didn’t hear every local premiere this past year, but Michael Alec Rose’s “Pastoral Concerto” certainly was an outstanding piece. Soloist Peter Sheppard Skaerved, a Grammy-nominated English violinist who leads the Kreutzer Quartet, seemed to inspire a high level... More >>
• Best End of a Classical Music Era
  Leonard Slatkin's Season Finale With the Nashville Symphony
  After three years helping guide the Nashville Symphony through the transition after Kenneth Schermerhorn's passing, conductor Leonard Slatkin went out...well, let's not say "with a bang," but definitely in grand style. The symphony achieved a string of successes under his baton, from the gala... More >>
• Best Diva Appearance
  Renée Fleming at Ingram Hall
  How often does a real live internationally renowned opera diva come into Music City and perform her signature selection of lieder and art songs? Like, never? The gracious and beautiful Fleming's April appearance at Ingram Hall was one of the most important classical music events of the year, not... More >>
• Best Temporary Theater Venue
  Writer's Stage's Charlotte Avenue Location
  Playwright Jim Reyland caught a break last fall when some kindly developers told him he could use a vacant office building on Charlotte for his theatrical endeavors—and rent-free, to boot. So Reyland marshaled friends and family and turned an accounting firm into a very functional and... More >>
• Best Shakespeare Shake-Up
  Richard the Third at the Troutt Theater
  Nowadays it's common to see Shakespeare's plays dressed up in '60s tie-dye or even Nazi SS gear in order to engage the dwindling attention span of a modern audience. It's rare that this kind of revisionism goes beyond well-meaning gimmickry, but Nashville Shakespeare Festival's production of... More >>
• Best Local Premieres
  Tennessee Women's Theatre Project
  Since its inception, TWTP has made a commitment to local premieres. They went one better in the past year with the U.S. premiere of Susan Coyne's Kingfisher Days, while also presenting Lisa Kron's Well to Nashville audiences for the first time. Other companies—notably Actors Bridge... More >>
• Best Stagecraft
  Actors Bridge/Belmont University's Arabian Nights
  This fall 2008 collaboration by Actors Bridge Ensemble and Belmont University at the Troutt Theater proved to be a showcase for sensual and alluring design elements, starting with Paul Gattrell's fabulous set, featuring a front thrust, impressive ribbon-clad pillars and ornate angular platforms.... More >>
• Best New Theater Building
  Amun Ra Theatre Playhouse
  Amun Ra Theatre artistic director jeff obafemi carr recently caused quite a stir recently when he camped out on his theater’s rooftop to raise operating funds. That successful and imaginative publicity stunt should help provide some financial stability for carr’s theater group, housed... More >>
• Best Children’s Theater Production
  Nashville Children’s Theatre’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
  Director Julie Brooks probably had her hands full pulling together the disparate elements of this multimedia revival of the Roald Dahl classic. That was her problem, of course. The rest of us enjoyed the live action, integrated seamlessly with prerecorded video sequences; the goofy music... More >>
• Best Original Play
  Trish Crist’s What
  There were a handful of worthy original plays mounted locally the past year, but for economical craft, intellectual acuity and writerly playfulness, Crist’s collection of short scenes was hard to beat. Recalling the spirit of Seinfeld, What managed to engagingly evoke modern life, with all... More >>
• Best One-Man Show
  Kevin Thornton's Sex, Dreams and Self-Control
  >Actor/songwriter/band frontman Kevin Thornton has successfully performed this show in other cities—testament to his ability to tap into a national audience for his offbeat, self-absorbed, music-laced monologues sketching out his early life growing up gay in Indiana. Bongo After Hours... More >>
• Best Road Show
  (Tie) Avenue Q & Jersey Boys
  This is pretty much a TPAC toss-up. Jersey Boys was a glitzy, fantastically directed and performed journey through the lives and careers of the pop group The Four Seasons, featuring the great music of songwriter (and occasional Nashville resident) Bob Gaudio. But hats off also to TPAC for... More >>
• Best Promotion of the Bard
  Nashville Shakespeare Festival
  NSF deserves recognition for keeping its stock in trade—the Bard—in the public consciousness. The community-centered "Shakespeare Allowed," which continues to present at the public library, offered average citizens the chance to perform Shakespeare's great works in a supportive... More >>
• Best Downturn Fundraising
  Tennessee Repertory Theatre
  The Rep looked the recession in the eye, and—so far, anyway—it was the recession that blinked. In these troubled times, no one's out of the woods yet, but when the Rep needed $100,000, by golly, they went out there and got it, by making an effective appeal to the theatergoing... More >>
• Best Musical
  Sweeney Todd
  Tennessee Rep turned TPAC's Johnson Theater sideways for its galvanizing mounting of the Sondheim classic. London looked foreboding and foggy per Gary Hoff's compressed set, and a small but mighty cast acted, sang and played stagehands as well in a marvelously brooding production that was daring... More >>
• Best Community Theater Production
  ACT 1's The Mikado 

  This one came as somewhat of a surprise. In truth, in the comparative history of Gilbert & Sullivan, the ACT 1 production was fairly lo-tech in all respects. But director Bob Fish made strong casting choices with the likes of James Rudolph, Daniel Sadler and Whitney Rose Cone. Meanwhile, the... More >>
• Best Theatrical Impersonation of Jesus
  Ben Van Diepen
  Boiler Room Theatre's revival of Jesus Christ Superstar was a flawed but tantalizing effort that transported its audience back to the hippie era. Still, anyone who saw the show had to admire Van Diepen's performance as Jesus. His singing and acting were fine, but the way he effected his... More >>
• Best Arts Package Deal
  NowPlayingNashville.com's Arts A La Carte
  Have you been saying for years, "I really need to check out the ballet," yet you sit at home Friday nights watching Law & Order reruns? Are you a closeted opera fan? Still never seen a show at TPAC? Has the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee got a deal for you! Through its one-stop arts... More >>
• Best Film Podcast
  The Film Talk
  If you've never been accosted after a press screening by Nashville critic and filmmaker Jett Loe, who has the boundless enthusiasm of Tigger pouncing on Piglet, the podcast he co-hosts with Irish author Gareth Higgins is the next best thing. Week after week, they re-create the kind of animated... More >>
• Best Film Series
  International Lens
  With Vanderbilt's Sarratt Cinema back in play, a crucial missing puzzle piece has been placed in the city's moviegoing options. Sarratt was many Nashvillians' first exposure to the Nouvelle Vague, midnight movies or early American independents: Now, through this series, the college cinema is... More >>
• Best Night at the Movies
  Lawrence of Arabia at The Belcourt
  As the Oscar buzz is set to begin in earnest, we're looking back on a pretty good year for movies. If I didn't know better, I'd be rooting for an epic tale of imperialism, hubris, prejudice and cruelty that takes place in a Middle East divided against itself along tribal fault lines. Sounds... More >>
• Best Collective Film Effort
  Brent Stewart/Michael Carter/James Clauer
  They're all friends, they're all from Nashville, they've all worked with Harmony Korine, and they've all demonstrated their talent over the years with a variety of short films. Now they're all pooling their talents to work on each other's feature projects, at a planned rate of one per quarter.... More >>
• Best Little-Known Library Feature
  Movies at Main
  Deep in the catacombs of the Nashville Public Library—OK, on the entrance level around the corner—resides the Popular Materials staff and a treasure trove of DVDs and VHS tapes, everything from Samuel Fuller's Underworld, U.S.A. to Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman. Any of these might... More >>