The Hugo Awards 2020: Or How Not to Run an Awards Ceremony

The 2020 Hugo Awards were presented last night at ConZealand, the first virtual WorldCon. Originally intended be held in New Zealand, the convention was moved online due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. George R.R. Martin remotely MCed the Hugo Awards from his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Both the WorldCon and the Hugo Awards represented an impressive technical achievement, with nominees and attendees taking part in events from across the globe, braving challenging time zone adjustments (the Hugo Awards started at midnight in the UK, even later in parts of Europe) to come together to represent the best of the genre.

Unfortunately, the tone and atmosphere of the wilds was, at times, at wild variance with the nominees and the winners. The Hugo Awards have evolved over the last decade to represent a more forward-thinking genre, overcoming controversies and attempts to subvert it. Seeing the award move away from constant rewarding of "the old standbys" towards genuinely rewarding more original and innovative SFF books by newer voices has been heartening. All of the nominees (well, apart maybe from me) this year had produced worthwhile and innovative work.

George R.R. Martin's hosting of the ceremony, however, focused almost exclusively on the ancient history of the award, citing winners and influential figures in the field dating back to the 1940s or even earlier. In his opening ceremony Martin noted that the virtual nature of the WorldCon this year would have brought more attention to it than previously from newcomers, and seemed determined to provide a potted history of the award and of the convention for their benefit. Not necessarily a bad idea and it would have been interesting to see this in the context of, perhaps, a historical documentary series or series of podcasts or some other format. Doing so during the award ceremony itself resulted at a schizophrenic feel to proceedings, as award recipients spoke about their work and their inspirations in 2020, only to cut to Martin and, later, Robert Silverberg discussing obscure WorldCon trivia from fifty or sixty years earlier about writers with no current relevance to the awards.

The situation was not helped by Martin mispronouncing several award recipients' names and even one of the nominated semiprozines. All nominees - including myself, with possibly literally the most straightforward name of all the nominees - were asked for a phonetic spelling of their name and those with unusual (from an American POV) names were also given the chance to provide a recording of the correct pronunciation, and all of this material was made available to ConZealand. It is unclear if ConZealand made this material available to Martin as well, although obviously they should have done so. Given that most of the names were voiced in pre-recorded inserts and the decision to switch to a virtual con was made many months ago, it is unclear why this was an issue.

The resulting, inevitable problem was the stupendous length of the ceremony. Over recent years the Hugo Awards have tended towards brevity and I was very happy that all three of the ceremonies I have attended (London 2014, Helsinki 2017 and Dublin 2019) were short and snappy, coming in at between two and two and a half hours. When older fans told me that back in the 1980s and 1990s, three and even four-hour ceremonies were not unknown, I was quite horrified. I know that GRRM was also a fan of the shorter, snappier Hugos, so it was surprising to see the length of the ceremony extend up towards the three hour thirty mark. My category was the fifth, which we didn't reach until 1 hour and 45 minutes into proceedings (I didn't win, with the multi-talented and insightful Bogi Takács instead taking the well-deserved Best Fan Writer prize). The timezone displacement was particularly punishing for us European fans, as the ceremony didn't start until midnight and carried on until well past 3am.

To say the handling of the award ceremony was flawed is an understatement: there was a tone deafness given recent changes in SFF fan culture and the makeup of the nominees (somewhat inexplicably, given that GRRM has championed some of those changes himself during previous Hugo controversies and has brought in new voices to the field through his anthology, Wild Cards and TV work), the ceremony went on around twice as long as was strictly necessary and there doesn't seem to be any excuse for making mistakes with people's names given the resources at hand.

I hope lessons are learned ahead of next year's ceremony.

UPDATE: George R.R. Martin has responded to some of the criticisms here. He notes that he was not passed on the phonetic recordings for nominees' names and that only a few written phonetic spellings were provided.

Of course, congratulations to all of the winners from last night's ceremony, all of them giving acceptance speeches of grace and dignity. A cut-down version of the award ceremony focusing on the acceptance speeches follows:

Best Novel: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

Best Novella: This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Best Novelette: Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin

Best Short Story: “As the Last I May Know” by S.L. Huang

Best Series: The Expanse by James S. A. Corey

Best Related Work: “2019 John W. Campbell Award Acceptance Speech”, by Jeannette Ng

Best Graphic Story or Comic: LaGuardia, written by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford, colours by James Devlin

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Good Omens, written by Neil Gaiman, directed by Douglas Mackinnon

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: The Good Place: The Answer

Best Editor, Short Form: Ellen Datlow

Best Editor, Long Form: Navah Wolfe

Best Professional Artist: John Picacio

Best Semiprozine: Uncanny Magazine, editors-in-chief Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, nonfiction/managing editor Michi Trota, managing editor Chimedum Ohaegbu, podcast producers Erika Ensign and Steven Schapansky

Best Fanzine: The Book Smugglers, editors Ana Grilo and Thea James

Best Fancast: Our Opinions Are Correct, presented by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders

Best Fan Writer: Bogi Takács

Best Fan Artist: Elise Matthesen

Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book: Catfishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer

Astounding Award for Best New Writer: R.F. Kuang

The 2021 Hugo Awards will be held, pandemic permitting, at the DisCon III WorldCon, which runs 25-29 August 2021 in Washington, DC.

The Good Place: Seasons 1-2

Eleanor Shellstrop is killed by freak accident involving shopping trolleys and an erectile dysfunction advertising truck. She wakes up in a surprisingly non-denominational afterlife and is told that, thanks to a life dedicated to charity and selflessness, she has made it to "the good place." Unfortunately, there's been a mistake. Eleanor is superficial, selfish, self-centred and cynical. Terrified at this mistake being discovered, Eleanor sets out on a quest to become a better person...whatever that means.

The Good Place is a sitcom riffing on some pretty weighty themes: life, death, religion, morality, existentialism and ethics. Fortunately, it's also an extremely funny show. Created by Michael Schur, modern American TV's sitcom-whisperer (he cut his teeth on the American Office before co-creating Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine), it's a high concept that the show repeatedly explores and deconstructs. It's also, startlingly, a heavily serialised show. The Good Place is not a status quo sitcom, it's an ongoing, continuing narrative. The fact that each episode is called a "Chapter" and the numbering continues between seasons confirms this.

Thematically the show is an exploration of whether our characters are set in stone by immutable factors, or if we can change ourselves for the better, and if doing so out of fear (in this case, the fear of going to "the bad place") is still morally a good thing if the results are positive and beneficial, for the individual or the community. Students of ethics and philosophy will get a buzz out of some very funny jokes revolving around Kant, Plato and Aristotle.

Schur knows that such musings aren't going to be for everyone, so also grounds the comedy through the character of Eleanor, who has no particular interest in such ideas. The exceptionally-talented Kristen Bell (Veronica Mars, Heroes, Fanboys, Frozen) is as watchable and funny as ever as Eleanor, depicting her as a selfish woman who is only out for #1 but rapidly evolves as a person when she finds herself in the afterlife and having to make up for her mistakes after the fact. William Jackson Harper is also exceptional as Chidi, a neurotic ethics professor whose help Eleanor enlists to become a better person. Rounding out the main cast are Jameela Jamil as uber-socialite Tahani, Manny Jacinto as Jianyu (a Buddhist monk who is more - or less - than he seems), D'Arcy Carden as Janet (a personal assistant who constructs and maintains the good place) and the mighty Ted Danson as Michael, the sort-of angel who designed this particular version of the good place. The cast is exceptional, with great chemistry.

The show's continuously developing plot and short-order seasons (each season is only 13 episodes long, each only 22 minutes in length) makes it both easy to catch up with and addictive to watch. For a high-concept sitcom not to exploit its ideas until they're dry but instead relentlessly finding new ground is unusual, but works very well.

The show does have a couple of weaknesses. First, it moves so fast that sometimes it feels a bit too fast, and a couple of holding-pattern episodes to let viewers catch their breath might be welcome. Secondly, and this is mildly spoilerific, the show presses a big reset button at several key points in the story, junking the character (but not story) development we've seen over multiple episodes and resetting the characters to their Episode 1 status. There's a good story reason for this and the cast copes with it quite well, but it can be frustrating to see our characters playing "getting to know you" again when we've already seen that twice before. Hopefully this will stop with the upcoming third season and the writers will let the characters grow more effectively.

The first two seasons of The Good Place (****½) are funny, well-characterised, cleverer than you'd think and extremely enjoyable, with the writers and actors on the top of their game. The Good Place airs on NBC in the US and on Netflix in much of the rest of the world.