The 2008 Pulitzer Prizes were announced today, and the Washington Post racked up an extraordinarily impressive six of them. It’s no surprise that the Public Service category went to Dana Priest, Anne Hull and photographer Michel du Cille for their investigative series into the poor conditions at Walter Reed Hospital. The Breaking News award for their coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings was also a good bet. Some of the other awards were slightly more surprising.

Jo Becker and Barton Gellman won the National Reporting award for their exploration of Vice President Dick Cheney’s influence on national policy. Steve Fainaru took home the International Reporting award for his series on private security contractors in Iraq that operate outside most of the laws governing American forces. Gene Weingarten’s staged experiment, where he had violinist Joshua Bell play inside a D.C. Metro station to see if anyone would notice him, was awarded for Feature Writing, and business columnist Steven Pearlstein won the Commentary award for relentlessly predicting the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

A full list of this year’s Pulitzer winners can be found here. The Post fell just one award shy of tying the record for the most Pulitzers in a single year, which is held by the New York Times, having been awarded seven in 2001 2002 for their Sept. 11 coverage.

What do you think of all the Post’s awards? The most controversial one is probably Weingarten’s. We enjoyed the Joshua Bell story, but it was also criticized for being inherently gimmicky.