Awards shows have always had an emotional element to the winners and losers.
The best movie, TV show, song, or production should snare the highest awards, but other factors can’t help but creep in. When an actor is in his or her golden years, for example, they have a sentimental edge over the competition.
Or, as in the case of this year’s Best Actor Oscar winner Gary Oldman, a legacy of rock solid performances prior to becoming Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour.
Today, there’s another factor threatening to overwhelm the usual standards for the best of the best. How does the nominee factor into The Resistance?
Take a quick glance at the shows up for Emmys released earlier this week. The Handmaid’s Tale, which virtually every cultural critic insists is shorthand for the Trump-era dystopia, grabbed 20 nominations in all.
https://youtu.be/PJTonrzXTJs
Saturday Night Live, a show that cast aside bipartisan yuks to target Trump over and again, earned 21 nominations. That’s down slightly from the 22 nominations it received last year.
Even the reliably liberal Vox.com shredded the Emmy voters for the unnecessary SNL love:
But it is galling to me that [Alec] Baldwin was nominated yet again for his smugly horrible sleepwalk of a Donald Trump impersonation, which is not in the 100 worst things about the Trump administration but is surely in the top 200 somewhere. Right? It has to be. Right? Moving on.
The potential winners in the “Variety Talk Show” category are a who’s who of far-left entertainment. Jimmy Kimmel. Stephen Colbert. John Oliver. Samantha “feckless you-know-what” Bee.
Even the most recent Oscars and Grammys telecasts, featuring lower ratings and plenty of GOP bashing, scored nominations.
It all arrives with the reality that the show itself will brim with speeches excoriating President Trump, the GOP in general, or other conservative targets.
Politics occasionally enters the frame during awards season. Remember when the stiffer-than-stiff Al Gore, armed with a PowerPoint presentation and dubious predictions, won the Best Documentary Oscar for 2007’s An Inconvenient Truth? Or how the Emmy voters showered love on the cartoonish hit piece Game Change, which targeted Gov. Sarah Palin?
The current atmosphere feels different. Hollywood’s cultural power may be ebbing. They used up all their firepower on Trump in 2016 — and failed. Now, they’re letting their ideology flavor more and more product, from far-left movies like The First Purge to Resistance-themed shows like Supergirl.
Is it a stretch to expect the upcoming Emmys telecast, to be held Sept. 17, will be any different?
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