I just watched Lost Highway in the theaters. I had never had a chance to watch it on the big screen before, and I brought my SO. I love the movie since there's no clear cut interpretation, yet it also feels accessible. My SO hadn't seen it before, and while she thought it was fine overall, she really disliked that there isn't a canonical "this is what happened and this is what the things mean" explanation. The very thing that made me love the movie.
Come to think of it not sure if that says more about the 60s or the award though. Cripes there was something in the water back then.
Also, claim that hugo winners won only because of their gender is crap. They won't the vite fairly. Unlike sad puppies, they did not even needed politically motivated coordination for that.
The vote also is not fair. People publicly organize voting cliques on e.g. Reddit (to say nothing of what's happening in private), and the new system is extremely exploitable. But I think that's beside the point. The issue is the outcome. The Hugos used to not only reliably reflect the best in genre works, but also select works that would often be talked about decades later. How they achieved that is irrelevant, only that they used to be able to do so, and now do not.
I think the groups that coopt, or try to coopt, these sort of things (which obviously also includes the Puppy stuff), fail to realize that the prestige of something is not based on that thing itself - but on the value of that which it promotes. If MIT just started enrolling 'merely above average' students and printing out diplomas, then they'd quickly lose their prestige. The same thing has happened here.
Of course the Hugo obviously shouldn't just be "#1 book [in genre] on Amazon" because the entire point of awards is to focus on quality, which may not always be clearly reflected by sales. But when even the relatively small minority of people buying the winning book don't seem to like it as much as other books, something is quite wrong. Let alone the fact that Project Hail Mary came in last place, also behind books like She Who Became the Sun. [2]
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Desolation-Called-Peace-Teixcalaan-Bo...
[2] - https://www.amazon.com/She-Who-Became-Shelley-Parker-Chan-eb...
I like Project Hail Mary, too, and it's certainly more popular because the author is far more well known, but there's no question in my mind which one is "better", certainly in terms of deserving to win an award.
It is absurd to use the era where identity (gender, race) was key determinant of what will happen, before anything else.
Example, The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber [0] is a great exposition of gravitational effects when a planet-sized object appears in the sky nearby earth. Characters and unfolding story are meh. I pictured it as a C-grade 60's movie with stilted acting. But the way the earth was reacting and the moon coming apart was a great fictional invention and the way it was done was novel at the time!
In similar vein, Conan stories are great fantasy adventures with well described fights, battles, scenes. I've never found a better author to describe a fight - or a battle between armies - with enough detail to make it interesting and exciting and yet in relatively few words. I've also never read stories as sexist and racist... but I don't go out of my way to look for that I guess. I accepted it was written in the day it was and had to sort the wheat from the chaff.
On the other hand my favorite SF author, Gene Wolfe, has also won many other awards, like the Nebula and Locus awards. So you can find good stuff by using the awards as a starting point.
This hit the Hugo awards extra hard, because their voting method is especially vulnerable to lobbying, and warring factions have been lobbying to sway the body of voters one way or another.