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.
image:
The meteorite (Basement Rejects: Color Out of Space (2019))
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