Names and faces

Jimmy Kimmel will host the first major Hollywood awards ceremony of the coronavirus pandemic — but just how the Emmys will be held remains cloudy. Kimmel, who is also producing the Sept. 20 ceremony on ABC honoring TV’s best, acknowledged that in Tuesday’s announcement. “I don’t know where we will do this or how we will do this or even why we are doing this. But we are doing it, and I am hosting it,” the ABC late-night host said in a statement. The network said details on the show’s production will be announced soon. However, choosing Kimmel to emcee the ceremony reverses course from last year’s no-host Emmys. The entertainment industry is just beginning to restart production following a months-long shutdown aimed at curtailing the spread of covid-19. Orchestrating an awards ceremony during the ongoing pandemic with its crowd of presenters, nominees and guests is a daunting prospect, whether done virtually or otherwise. While the Emmys are plunging ahead as scheduled, other ceremonies are bowing to the pandemic’s pressures. The 93rd Academy Awards will be held April 25, 2021, eight weeks later than planned, and the British Academy Film Awards is shifting its originally announced February 2021 ceremony to April 11.

Padma Lakshmi has watched in anger as some politicians denigrate immigrants. She’s been left seething as newcomers are discriminated against or targeted. So she has responded with something she knows quite a lot about: food. Specifically, immigrant food: burritos, dosas, crab boil, pad Thai and poke. Lakshmi, a longtime judge of Bravo’s Top Chef, created and hosts the new Hulu documentary series Taste the Nation, which celebrates the food of American immigrants and indigenous people. “I am an immigrant. And I was just disgusted the way immigrants had been used as a pawn for political gain and been discriminated against so grossly by this administration. I guess this show is my rebuttal to that,” said Lakshmi, an Indian American who came to America when she was 4. Taste the Nation sees Lakshmi go to the Texas border city of El Paso and talk to locals about the wall. She goes to South Carolina to go crabbing and explore Gullah Geechee food. She goes to Las Vegas to spend time with Thai immigrants and to Arizona to forage for American Indian ingredients. With discussions on immigration, global warming, massacres, cultural stereotypes and racism, the show is a departure from most food shows, which avoid partisan politics or current events for fear of alienating viewers. “I wouldn’t even say that I was a very political person a few years ago, but I have out of necessity and anger and frustration and become very vocal,” Lakshmi said.

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