2021 Hugo Nominees That Are Worth Consuming

Best related works, movies, and fancasts

Best Related Work

Beowulf: A New Translation: If you want a faithful, lyrical translation of Beowulf, the gold standard remains Seamus Heaney. Beowulf: A New Translation isn’t chasing the futile goal of beating Heaney at his own game. Instead, it’s translating Beowulf but now with slang and memes!

Okay. So I realize this sounds like a youth pastor who wants to tell you that the real Last Jedi is Jesus Christ. But as I was reading Beowulf: A New Translation I realized that it’s actually… good? You know how when you’re reading really good poetry you can’t help but read it out loud? It feels like a magical incantation, like the entire universe has paused and leaned in to listen closely to what you’re saying? Beowulf: A New Translation starts like that with the first line and doesn’t stop till the last page. The translation sings. Maria Dahvana Headley has such a precise control over her register that every “bro” and “sashimi” and hashtag is absolutely what was called for in that moment. Her scansion, her alliteration, her attention to sound, her voice, there’s not a wrong word in this poem. It reads like the Beowulf poet is standing next to you at a feast spitting rhymes.

If you have the slightest interest in poetry or mythology you have to buy a copy of Beowulf: A New Translation immediately. It’s my strongest recommendation in this article.

A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler: I’m not sure who this biography is aimed at other than me, but I absolutely love it. Octavia Butler had a bunch of notebooks where she recorded, well, everything about her life—from budgets to to-do lists to affirmations to diary entries to lists of things which are sexy. A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky uses Butler’s diary entries as a framework to talk about what it was like to be Octavia Butler. It eschews the dramatic-life-events approach of most biographies and instead talks about the small, everyday details, from her bus rides to her library trips. It really gives you a sense of what it was like to be Octavia Butler. I’m fascinated by the fabric of people’s lives, and this book delivers.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

Birds of Prey (And The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn): I avoided watching this movie for more than a year because the fandom was incredibly annoying. Unfortunately, my sense of reviewer ethics requires me to admit that Birds of Prey is a really fun movie.

The annoying fandom won’t shut up about how this movie is Feminist (TM), which is part of the reason I avoided it. There is nothing I want to consume less than a blockbuster superhero movie which is Feminist (TM). I only take my important moral lessons about patriarchy from companies that don’t suck up to countries which commit genocide. Sorry!

Birds of Prey addresses my qualms by taking out all the important moral lessons and replacing them with hyenas. The closest that Birds of Prey comes to being feminist, other than the literal fact that it has a bunch of female characters in it, is that Harley Quinn breaks someone’s legs for sexually harassing her. Birds of Prey follows the world’s worst person as she runs around gleefully being evil and escaping any sort of consequence for her actions whatsoever. Birds of Prey is Fight Club as understood by nineteen-year-old frat boys, except with girls.

A shoutout to Ewan MacGregor for his role as the villain. Love it when serious actors get a chance to chew scenery. Everyone else who winds up playing the villain in a superhero movie, watch his performance and take notes. If you’re not having this much fun, why are you even here?

Palm Springs: A Groundhog Day movie. Due to blah blah technobabble, Sarah winds up endlessly repeating the day of her sister’s wedding. She meets Nyles, who has been trapped in the time loop for an uncountably long period of time, and has decided to live a hedonistic life without consequences.

One thing I liked about Palm Springs is that Sarah and Nyles both genuinely suck as people. They’re just awful? Not in a dramatic evil way, they’re bad like the worst person you know. The story makes you sympathize with them without ever making you forget how much they genuinely suck, and the tiny amount of personal growth they experience by the end of the movie is genuinely earned.

Sarah and Nyles also have a great dynamic as a romantic couple. They seem to like each other and get along, which is so rare in a romantic comedy. They have fun together! We’re not supposed to believe that they’re destined to be together because they’re both hot.

J. K. Simmons is in it and, as usual, he’s the highlight of every scene he’s in.

Soul: Pixar’s latest. It’s a Pixar movie? I don’t know what else I need to tell you. If you enjoy Pixar movies you will enjoy Soul.

The lush, rich animation of the afterlife is just breathtaking—vividly imagined, perfectly executed, and strikingly original, serving the theme instead of slavishly imitating a mythological afterlife. It felt almost like a blasphemy that I was watching it on my laptop screen instead of in a theater. I also enjoyed that it started out setting up a “follow your dreams and passions, no matter what” moral and ended up subverting it for a more mature and thoughtful theme that I think will genuinely stick with the people watching it.

Best Fancast

Be The Serpent: Be the Serpent is a podcast that feels like participating in a fannish Discord server with your closest friends—from the squeeing to the fanfic recommendations to the surprisingly deep literary analysis to the people who are inexplicably into shit with absolutely no merit whatsoever which you have to learn about against your will. Is this what people call “a parasocial relationship”? I personally have an adequate amount of fannish Discord server in my life but if you’re feeling the lack, Be the Serpent might compensate.

Kalanadi: Kalanadi gains many points in my book because the host looks uncannily similar to my girlfriend. I’m sure this is very relevant to everyone else, because you also all want to listen to people who look like my girlfriend infodump about science fiction.

Kalanadi reviews a lot of more obscure SF that you haven’t necessarily heard of, not just the stuff that’s currently popular on BookTube—whether that’s older SF like C. J. Cherryh or newer underrecognized gems like The Stone Weta. Her videos tend to be short, which is something I appreciate—some of them are less than ten minutes. No two-hour monstrosities here. In, out, a recommendation for some weirdass SF you should be reading.

The Skiffy and Fanty Show: The nice thing about the Skiffy and Fanty Show is that their podcast episodes about movies are enjoyable if you’ve never seen or indeed heard of the movie they’re discussing. I listened to their podcasts about House and Wild Wild West and felt more informed about Japanese horror cinema and terrible nineties steampunk, even though I felt absolutely no desire to watch either movie afterward. The analysis is accessible but also insightful. It’s not just “what is this about, should you watch this” but placing the movie in its context—both in terms of genre and what’s going on in the wider world—and thinking about its themes, symbolism, plot, and unfortunate implications. (Very unfortunate implications, in the case of Wild Wild West.)