And now for some items that could be nominated in the best dramatic presentation, long form category in this year's Hugo Awards. These are dramatic presentations that are more than 90 minutes long and which first appeared in 2020.
Possessor - Brandon Cronenberg's second feature deals with a body-swapping assassin whose sense of self is starting to break down. It is grim fare but an impressive piece of work.
Tenet - Directed by Christopher Nolan, this was meant to be the big budget film that would bring people back to the cinema after Covid lockdowns. Its time-travel plot might not bear too much analysis but it looks great and features some stunning action set pieces.
Bill & Ted Face The Music - This however may have been the time travel film we actually needed in 2020. The amiable twosome from the previous films find themselves tasked with writing the song that will unite the world and thereby save it from destruction. Along the way they travel forwards in time meeting possible future versions of themselves while their equally amiable daughters go into the past to recruit the greatest musicians of all time. It's a very likeable film and for me was the perfect antidote to 2020's year of grimness.
Children of the Stones - This audio drama adapts the classic 1970s TV series about a spooky English village set within a stone circle. A strong cast and great sound design make this a worthy updating of the much-loved original. It can be downloaded or streamed from the BBC website.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth - Another audio drama, this is the third of the Lovecraft Investigations directed and written by Julian Simpson for Sweet Talk Productions and the BBC. The story bears a loose relationship to the H. P. Lovecraft story of the same name and like previous series it is presented as though it was a true crime podcast. Aside from the spookiness, part of the fun in this one comes from how it incorporates real events of 2020 into the narrative. It and the previous series also be downloaded or streamed from the BBC website.
I will probably nominate all of the above. My prediction is that only Tenet and Bill & Ted make it onto the ballot.
Yesterday I grumbled about how the Hugo nomination rules work against non-mainstream cinema and highlighted some films that would have been great nominees for the 2021 Hugos if 2019 festival screenings had not invalidated them. Now for some dramatic presentations that are actually eligible, starting with ones shorter than 90 minutes, which compete in the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form category.
Last and First Men - This is Jóhann Jóhannsson's adaptation of Olaf Stapledon's classic novel of future history, featuring Tilda Swinton as the voice of our descendants from the unimaginably far future. This austere work is not for everyone but I think the film would be a worthy Hugo award flag-bearer for cerebral science fiction. It is available to view on the kind of streaming services that offer up weirdo art house films.
I Am Not Legend - This is an edited version of George Romero's classic Night of the Living Dead. The film-makers overdub new dialogue and replace the zombies with white blobs, apparently after printing off every frame from the original and manually altering them. I'm not sure the end result is that essential but it would make a great eligibility head scratcher for this year's Hugo administration team if a load of people tried to nominate it. However, I am not sure how one could go about seeing this (I saw it as part of the online Bram Stoker Festival).
Eternal - All kinds of items can be nominated in the Hugo dramatic presentation categories, not just films and TV programmes. Eternal, from Darkfield Radio, is an audio drama, designed so that you listen to it while lying in bed alone in a darkened room. I heard it as part of the Bram Stoker Festival, so you may be correctly guessing that it features vampires. UK-based readers can pay money to stream it from the Darkfield Radio website.
A Spell At Home, With Hester - This was a piece of live-streamed theatre by the Hermetic Arts theatre company, in which Carrie Thompson played the eponymous Hester. It was set up as though we were taking part in a Zoom magick ritual during which flaky Hester reveals the dark side of the quaint village she lives in. It is a companion piece to Carbury Gifts, which I have not yet seen. Both of these were performed at Rural Gothic events organised by the Folklore Podcast and Room 207 Press. I'm not sure how you could go about seeing either of these and I may be the only Hugo nominator who has actually seen A Spell At Home, With Hester.
I will probably nominate at least three of the above, though I suspect that Last and First Men is the only one with a chance of making it onto the final ballot, and even that is a long shot.
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Last and First Men (Observations on Film Art - Vancouver: First sightings)
Nominations will soon be open for the 2021 Hugo Awards, which will be awarded at this year's World Science Fiction Convention, DisCon III (the third Worldcon to take place in Washington DC). Something tells me you would like me to list the 2020 dramatic presentations I have seen. I will do so.
But first a gripe. One thing that increasingly irks me about the dramatic presentation categories in the Hugo Awards is their structural bias against non-mainstream cinema. By this I do not mean the way big budget films and TV programmes are more widely distributed and marketed, making it more likely that people will have seen them and so be able to nominate them. Nor do I mean the sad fact that for many people superhero punch-ups and Trek-Wars are the limit of their engagement with dramatic science fiction. What I am actually grumbling about is the way the nomination rules effectively render many non-mainstream films ineligible for the Hugos.
What do I mean here? Well, to be eligible for the Hugos, a dramatic presentation has to have been publicly presented for the first time in the previous calendar year. That's an easy condition to meet for mainstream cinema and TV works, which tend to be released to great fanfare more or less simultaneously all over the world. Non-mainstream cinema works differently, with films often being shown first at a film festival or two (often the Toronto film festival, which takes place in September) before receiving a proper release in the following year. This means that in the year these works are first publicly presented, hardly anyone will have seen them, and then by the time they have been shown more widely they are no longer eligible for the Hugos.
I know there is a procedure whereby the WSFS business meeting at Worldcon can extend the eligibility of a work that has only received a limited release. However, that can only be availed of if a work has champions who like going to WSFS business meetings. And it can only be done on a case by case basis. All this means that non-mainstream dramatic presentations often have an extra hoop to jump through before they even stand a chance of being nominated.
I don't know what can be done about this. It's hard to see how to re-write the Hugo rules to allow for items to be eligible when they are widely released without getting into horrendous arguments about what we mean by widely released. So I'm not blaming anyone for this sad state of affairs or even advocating for a change but rather I am raging against the cruel fates that have brought this situation into being.
This is all by way of bringing us to three films that were released in 2020 and would be well worth nominating for the 2021 Hugos if they were not ineligible because they were shown at film festivals in 2019. And here they are.
The Lighthouse - Robert Eggers' film of two lighthouse keepers going mad and resorting to onanism deals with themes of isolation that made it very relevant in our year of social distancing. It also features strong performances from Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. I think the presence of a mermaid and the general warping of reality would have otherwise made it eligible for the Hugos.
The Color Out of Space - No one ever talks about it but apparently H. P. Lovecraft was a bit of a racist, so maybe no one other than me would have wanted to nominate this adaptation of his classic short story of cosmic horror. Which is a shame, as aside from giving us director Richard Stanley's return to directing features it also boasts some strong performances by Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur and the rest of the cast, while the casting of black British actor as HPL analogue Ward Phillips would also irk Lovecraft's racist fans.
Sea Fever - Neasa Hardiman has directed a lot of TV but this was her accomplished feature film debut. It's a pity the pandemic meant that it did not receive a wide release, but its theme of contagion and isolation made it apposite to the times we are living in. A lazy person might describe this as The Thing meets Alien on a boat, but it is a considerably more interesting film than that makes it sounds, also subtly engaging with issues of neuro-divergence, human displacement, and global migration patterns.
Come back tomorrow when I will discuss some items that are actually eligible for this year's Hugo Awards.
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The meteorite (Basement Rejects: Color Out of Space (2019))
