2020 Hugos

[Elfy]

They often say that they want to make the awards more inclusive and then they go and nominate something that makes them more exclusive, as displayed with best related work and again with short form a few years back.

[S. K. Inkslinger]

I didn't know most of these stuffs, but I'm pretty glad Good Omens won. It was an amazing series, and interactions between Azeraphael and Crowley are definitely one of my most favorite things ever.

[cupiscent]

Can you go in details about GGRM? I'm curious but don't really want to subject myself to this whole thing...

GRRM was the host/toastmaster, and he was the one mispronouncing names (despite the Hugos being virtual this year, and thus all of his material being pre-recorded, and the organisers having asked nominees to provide a pronunciation guide to their names) and also talking a lot about Campbell.

A sidenote about John W Campbell! He's the guy after whom the new-writer award used to be named, until Jeannette Ng won it last year and used her winner's speech to point out that he was very exclusionist in his editorial policy, and that set the tone for the early years of science fiction and fantasy. The award was this year renamed to "the Astounding award". I think it's worth noting that Astounding was the name of John W Campbell's magazine. It's not like acknowledgement of his contribution to the early genre has been removed entirely. It's just no longer him in person by name that's being commemorated. I feel like that was a really nice compromise.

Apparently GRRM disagrees, because he seems to have taken every possible opportunity to praise Campbell during his very long speaking at the ceremony. (Of a nearly four-hour ceremony, I hear his segments took up nearly two hours.) Given that Jeannette Ng's speech from last year was actually nominated for a Hugo award in the "best related work" category, that seems... well, it's a choice he's made there, and I honestly don't know what he was trying to achieve.

[Nora]

Mmmh I see, thanks.

Well, I feel like we're lucky enough GRRM hasn't fallen to any worse controversy yet than being a bit too fond of Campbell. 
The mispronunciation though... probably means whoever runs the Hugo also didn't give a crap, since footage must have been run by them.
Sigh... hey, let's see the silver lining, at least the ceremony has authors whose names aren't random white British people's names. Maybe in 5 more years they'll get these names right. 

[cupiscent]

I do feel a certain degree of sympathy for the organisers this year, as the sudden pivot to 100% virtual everything can't have been easy. I "attended" WorldCon this year, and from the communications received regarding the convention and the awards, it was clear everyone was working very hard to get everything working in new formats, and also that it was extremely challenging to get it all over the line on time. (The convention schedule was barely working the weekend before the con started; the Hugo voters' packet was very late.)

That said, there were benefits that come from being virtual, and one of those is that they had an immense pool of volunteers to draw from (not just those physically present in Wellington), and that they could do a lot of things ahead of time. They don't seem to have made the best use of these opportunities. It wasn't quite the first all-virtual convention - the Nebula conference and awards were run in late May, and Mary Robinette Kowal has tweeted about how all the training and learnings from that event were passed on and offered in detail to the Hugos... and were not taken up. Again, I have sympathy for how clearly under the hammer the organisers were. But I'm really disappointed in the choices they made and the focus that put on the ceremony - a focus that didn't seem to be on the nominees, whose big night it should arguably have been.

[hexa]

John W Campbell disliked the name Astounding.  He pleaded for years to change the name.  It wasn't until the year 1960 that it was changed to Analog.  Campbell believed that the name Astounding was too sensational