I watched the Hugo Awards ceremony live earlier today (in both UK and NZ timezones), and decided I will pull a coherent post together rather than keep spamming ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
muccamukk's comments ...
The Good
There were many excellent winners: while not everything I wanted to win did[1], all the winners are of a standard I can look at and say "yes, I can see why that won, it is that good". The acceptance speeches were at a very high standard: brilliant, thoughtful, often generous and lifting others up. And many of them "political", in that they named and spoke against the many ways the status quo in SFF and the wider world harms many of us. (I have a standard rant here about how everything is political, and things that get called "political" are usually pointing out problems with the status quo; seeing nothing wrong with the status quo and wanting nothing to change is also a political position.)
[1] I voted in 16 of the 19 categories, each with six finalists. Of those, seven awards were won by my 1st choice, six by my 2nd choice and three by my 3rd choice.
There were some tech "wobbles" in the live stream, but those are easily forgiveable given the stitching together of pre-recorded and live video streams from around the world. As we've all been discovering this year, audiovisual media production is a highly skilled job! I did love all the different glimpses of winners homes we saw in the acceptance speeches (some live, some recorded).
I particularly appreciated the way the finalists in the art category were presented, with time to appreciate each piece, and I also enjoyed the short video by the artist John Flower about making the bases for the 2020 Hugo Awards, and the elements specific to New Zealand / Aotearoa.
The convention Discord has a channel #major-events and I found joining in the discussion there a really great and friendly experience, with the moderators stepping in appropriately a couple of times. I would love a similar text-based chat channel to be a part of all future Hugo Awards ceremonies. I was also engaging with fellow Hugo-watchers on Twitter, but the Discord was more rewarding.
The Bad
George R R Martin was the Toastmaster, and Robert Silverberg was the presenter of two of the awards and they both did a lot of long rambling anecdotes in pre-recorded videos about the history of the Hugos and Worldcon and all the fun times they had then. It felt very tone-deaf, and also really unfair on the finalists waiting to find out who had won their category. (To be honest, this was where I was most grateful for the Discord channel, where we spent quite a bit of time discussing the finalists for each category while waiting for the old white men to finish talking.)
GRRM spent a long time in the preamble to the Astounding Award (2nd of the evening) banging on about what a great guy John W. Campbell was. Given that the award was renamed last year shortly after a brilliant speech by Jeannette Ng, which itself was a finalist for Best Related Work later in the same damn award ceremony, this felt ... tone-deaf at best. At worst, GRRM was using his position and power to make an extended targeted complaint at Ng for ... daring to name Campbell's facism out loud and in public.
There was a LOT of mispronounciation of names of finalists, starting with the winner of this year's Astounding Award, R F Kuang, which was ... unfortunate timing, so close to praising the fascist gatekeeper who would certainly not have published her work.
On a separate matter, Claire Rousseau, whose YouTube channel was the first video fancast to become a Hugo finalist, was pretty upset that the presenter's spiel about Best Fancast only talked about podcasts, and didn't even mention video as a medium. Certainly I was unaware she was the first video-medium fancast finalist, and that would have been a cool thing to know.
Overall I think 1 is possibly a matter of taste, but felt pretty disrespectful to current finalists and audiences. 2 was definitely edging over from taste into bullying territory and 3 was just deeply unprofessional and disrespectful.
4 was not GRRM, and could easily have been an accident, but in the context of the disrespect shown by 1-3, it's probably extra hurtful.
Some Responses
The entire ceremony stream can be viewed online at The Fantasy Network. There is a supercut of just the key intros and acceptance speeches, created very quickly by ![[youtube.com profile]](https://youtube.com/favicon.ico)
TheReadingOutlaw / ![[twitter.com profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
anoutlawlife.
CoNZealand has put out a brief apology which is reasonably good on issue 4, but a bit unsatisfactory on the rest. "Phonetic guidelines were made available to us, and we did not overcome the challenges we faced." I do not consider getting someone's name right to be a challenge to overcome, just a minimum professional standard. Or was the challenge dealing with GRRM's response to criticism? (After all, this is the guy who wrote several thousand words justifying why his party in Dublin didn't go so well last year.)
Also: "The Chairs also made the decision to provide an agnostic platform for all the participants, and did not place restrictions on any speech or presentations." Yes, you get to do this, and no-one is stopping you, but that is a choice. It was a choice not to ask the Big Name Old SF Writers to be more succinct, and not to double-check that everyone had practiced how to pronounce people's names, and it was definitely a choice not to challenge your successful and famous Toastmaster about his unsubtle digging at a much younger early-career finalist. You can absolutely choose not to set and enforce some minimum professional standards for your event, because any kind of standard is "placing restrictions", but you shouldn't be surprised at public criticism as a direct consequence of that choice.
