The 2020 Hugo Awards on August 1 marked the first time science fiction and fantasy fandom's major awards ceremony was held entirely online. The winners, voted on by members of Worldcon, were as worthy a bunch as ever, including A Memory Called Empire winning Best Novel, Good Omens winning Best Dramatic Presentation - Long Form and LaGuardia winning Best Graphic Story or Comic. However, much of the talk online about the 2020 Hugo ceremony has been extremely negative, and it's mostly related to George R.R. Martin's hosting.
The Song of Ice and Fire author expounded at length about his personal experiences in fandom decades ago. The ceremony was originally scheduled to last two hours, but it ballooned to three and a half after Martin submitted all his pre-recorded segments. Running too long is often a standard awards show problem, but many found what transpired in this time to be problematic.
Martin has apologized for one of the biggest failings of the ceremony: mispronouncing the names of many of the nominees, particularly nominees of color. By his account, this was as much the convention's failing for not providing guides or corrections as it was his own: "Pronunciation has never been my strong suit. I even mispronounce the name of my own characters at times (witness some of my interviews). But at no point in the process was I ever given a phonetic guide to how to pronounce all the other finalists, the ones who did not win. Had I received that, I would certainly have made every effort to get all the names correct."
CoNZealand, this year's Worldcon event which hosted the virtual Hugos, also apologized for the pronunciation issues as well as its decision to "not place restrictions on any speech or presentations" (itself a standard that was not consistently applied across the convention, resulting in at least one account of political censorship). One skit focusing on genitalia of awards trophies, which some viewers found transphobic, resulted in an apology right as the ceremony was still airing.
Perhaps the biggest problem the ceremony's many critics have taken issue with was Martin's particular choice to spend so much time praising John W. Campbell. Campbell was the editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine from 1937 until his death in 1971, and until this year, had a Best New Writer award named after him. Last year's winner of the John W. Campbell award, Jeannette Ng, used her acceptance speech to call out Campbell's extreme racist views, and this year the award's name was changed to the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Ng won this year's Best Related Work Hugo for her 2019 acceptance speech.
In light of all this, Martin's decision to spend so much time as the Hugo host talking so highly of Campbell, and more generally focusing on old stories about problematic faves rather than celebrating the current sci-fi/fantasy landscape, reads to many as tone deaf at best, deliberately antagonistic at worst. The 2020 Hugos highlighted a stark contrast between the nostalgia for SFF's past and the critical work being done in the present to improve the genre's future.