Hi Tom.
The Annual Awards process has multiple stages. Each category gets whittled down to either 7 or 5 (depending on how many total qualifying entries there are, for instance every edit released in 2012 is a potential nominee for Fanedit of the Year, so there will be a total of 7 final nominees).
The public round for Fanedit of the year helped reduce the total number of possible edits to be considered. This number will be added to the 12 FEOTM winners and then the Academy will use that selection of edits to determine the final 7 nominees.
Once those nominees are selected, a final vote will be made comprised of qualifying Academy members, Staff, Admins and former winners of the category. anyone up for an award does not qualify even if they are in the above group.
The specific nature of whittling down each category varies depending on the total number of possible edits or nominees. Some are being done by the Academy only, others include the public poll, and most use the FEOTM winners as automatic consideration before the final nominee list.
I'm running a little behind in coordinating the voting due to a recent lack of my being around the site, but am back on track now so expect to see more updates in the coming weeks.