It’s time to reward your favorite TV series. HBO’s Succession series, which follows the throes of a powerful family whose members plot and tear each other apart, arrived on Tuesday at the top of the race for the Emmy Awards, equivalent to the Oscars for American television, with 25 nominations in total.
Winner in 2020, Succession will face in particular the South Korean series Squid Game, a dark and violent denunciation of the excesses of capitalism which has gone down in history as the first production in a language other than English to compete in the flagship category of drama series.
Netflix’s most-watched series to date features hundreds of characters from South Korea’s most marginalized fringes competing in children’s games like ‘one, two, three, sun’ to win a whopping sum of money. money, at the risk of being killed.
Heavyweight collision
The competition promises to be tight ahead of the awards ceremony on September 12 with confirmed heavyweights like Stranger Things, ozark and Better Call Saul.
After the health restrictions that forced Hollywood to close its film sets during the pandemic, productions are back to “an historic level” and the Academy Emmy Awards “received a record number of nominations this season”, said its director, Frank Scherma.
Comedy side, Ted Lasso (Apple TV+), winner last year, is in pole position with 20 nominations. The series featuring an American football coach parachuted into an English football team will notably face it The Fabulous Mrs. Maisel and barry. It will also take into account hacks and Only Murders in the Building who each received 17 nominations for this 74th edition.
For mini-series, it’s The White Lotus (HBO), a satire on the hypocrisy and superficiality among wealthy clients of a luxury hotel in Hawaii, which stands out with 20 nominations as well, including eight for its actors alone.
progress for women
The main actor of Squid GameLee Jung-jae, is in the running in the drama series category, alongside the stars of Succession, Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong. Colin Firth (The Staircase), Andrew Garfield (Under the Banner of Heaven), Oscar Isaac (Scenes From a Marriage) and Michael Keaton (dopesick) have passed the milestone of nominations and will compete on September 12 for the Emmy Award for best actor in a mini-series.
Among actresses, the young Zendaya, Hollywood darling for a few years and already crowned at the Emmys in 2020 for Euphoriais once again well placed to win, with Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh (Killing Eve) as well as Reese Witherspoon, luckier than her co-star of The Morning Show Jennifer Aniston who did not qualify.
The latest nominations for directing, screenplay and technical categories show clear progress for women, who have traditionally been underrepresented in entertainment industry awards in these areas. Almost half of the directors selected this year are women, like Amy Poehler for her documentary Lucy and Desi and Lorene Scafaria, nominated in the flagship drama series category for “Succession”. There are also about 40% women in screenplay nominations.
The absents
On the disappointing side, the absence of Selena Gomez for Only Murders in the Building, comedy series which will however be represented by its male colleagues Steve Martin and Martin Short. Among the stars snubbed on Tuesday, observers of Hollywood politics also noted the absence in the mini-series category of Julia Roberts (Gaslit) and Jessica Chastain (Scenes from a Marriage), in favor of less established actresses, such as Amanda Seyfried (The Dropout) and Julia Garner (Inventing Anna).
Series Yellowstone, which mixes modern western and soap opera, stars Kevin Costner and gathered 11 million viewers for the launch of its fourth season. However, she left empty-handed with the nominations. Since its inception, the series has actually only earned a meager nomination, in a minor technical category.
Voters may have been put off by the show’s overtly conservative overtones or its airing on the relatively modest Paramount Network. The popularity of Yellowstone has nevertheless continued to grow, especially among the elites with progressive leanings.
Posthumous nomination for Chadwick Boseman
Chadwick Boseman, on-screen incarnation of the superhero Black Panther of the Marvel saga, died in August 2020 of colon cancer, a disease he had never publicly mentioned. Last year, he narrowly missed winning a posthumous Oscar for Ma Rainey’s Blues but Anthony Hopkins had finally prevailed.
The 2022 Emmy Awards are likely Hollywood’s last chance to award an award to this artist, who lent his voice to an animated version of Black Panther for an episode of the series “What If…? broadcast on Disney+.
Actress Jessica Walter (Arrested Development), who died in March 2021 at the age of 80, is also selected this year posthumously for having lent her voice to a character in the animated series Archer.
Barack Obama…nominated
Hollywood awards are always very inventive when it comes to lining up prestigious names in nominations and this batch of Emmys is no exception. Among the nominees in the “narrative” category are the legend of wildlife documentaries, the British David Attenborough, and the Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o.
More surprisingly, the 74th edition brings together in the same category the former basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, for a documentary on the black heroes of the American Civil War, and former President Barack Obama, who comments on a series documentary about national parks.
Barack Obama will have to wait for the ceremony on September 12 to find out if he can add an Emmy alongside the Nobel Peace Prize and the two Grammy Awards which are already enthroned on his mantelpiece.
Dave Chappelle selected despite controversy
Comedian Dave Chappelle has sparked controversy in the United States for jokes seen by some as contemptuous of transgender people, including in his show The Closer aired last year on Netflix. Demonstrators gathered in particular in front of the headquarters of the video on demand giant, in Los Angeles, to denounce the comments of the comedian.
In this show, the stand-up star notably asserted that “the existence of the genre is a fact” and that its detractors are “too sensitive”. “In our country, you can shoot and kill” a black man, “but don’t you dare offend a gay person,” said Dave Chappelle, himself black. Voters for the Academy of Emmy Awards were obviously not deterred by this controversy and selected Dave Chappelle for The Closer.
In total, it is the HBO channel and its HBO Max video-on-demand platform that win points during this nomination session, with 140 candidates against only 105 for its big competitor Netflix.