Could an Emmy win help sci-fi at Oscars?
Will it change everything? Or, at least, you know, the winner of a few Hollywood awards?
Those are some of the questions prompted after “Game of Thrones,” with its many Internet controversies and graphic love scenes, walked away with the Emmy for outstanding drama series after four previous nominations in the category yielded nada.
The HBO show based, in part, on George R.R. Martin’s 567,214 pages of printed words is the purest genre series to take the big prize and only the second genre series period. (“Lost,” which won in 2005, had its Stephen King-ish elements but was a far cry from a land of dragons and red weddings.)
Part of why “Thrones” won in its fifth season is not because the show has changed over the years — I’ll leave it to the devotees to decide whether that’s to the good — but because the Television Academy has. The group revised Emmys rules this year, among other things expanding the number of nominees, which in turn can spread the votes more thinly and reward a series with a small but intense band of followers — i.e., genre shows. It also has added younger members of the kind more likely to watch and vote for “Thrones.”
These changes sound a lot like the changes of the Motion Picture Academy, which is entering its seventh year with an expanded roster of best picture nominees and has made a big push to get younger and more diverse.
Which leads to an Oscars question: Could a movie of a certain pure genre quality — namely science fiction, which has never boasted a winner despite many worthy and popular entries — take the prize there too?
It’s a salient question this year with the nearcertain ascent of Ridley Scott’s “The Martian.” As you likely know from every billboard in the known universe, the movie, set several decades into the future, stars Matt Damon as a botanist astronaut stranded on Mars.
It has a classic academy feel, with rally-around-the-flag themes that are very Space Race America, only now the race is global and a lot more collaborative. Plus, there’s apparently no one on Earth not rooting for the astronaut to come home. And that’s about as classic Oscar as it gets.