From django>=1.8 you can use annotate and F object
from django.db.models import F
MyModel.objects.annotate(renamed_value=F('cryptic_value_name')).values('renamed_value')
Also extra() is going to be deprecated, from the django docs:
This is an old API that we aim to deprecate at some point in the future. Use it only if you cannot express your query using other queryset methods. If you do need to use it, please file a ticket using the QuerySet.extra keyword with your use case (please check the list of existing tickets first) so that we can enhance the QuerySet API to allow removing extra(). We are no longer improving or fixing bugs for this method.