Emmy Awards 2014: Nomination Postmortem

Now that the Emmy nominations are out in the wild we can all start speculating on the winners. The choice was made a little more interesting when Woody Harrelson was also nominated for Best Actor in a Drama along with McConaughey, who everyone thought was a shoe-in anyway. It was thought that Harrelson was going to be ignored entirely for his role as Marty, but that is apparently not the case. What we have now is two great actors with very different roles going head-to-head. It was perhaps the only real surprise of the nominations when it came to True Detective.

Over the course of several months McConaughey’s role as Rust has seemingly taken on a life of its own — jokes about Rust’s philosophies are now rampant. In the wake of McConaughey’s success, Harrelson has been left somewhat in the dust. It’s going to be difficult to look at the roles subjectively simply do to Rust’s popularity and McConaughey’s recent win at the Critic’s Choice Awards. It’s going to be interesting to see who takes this one as it may not be as cut and dry as previously thought.

Other great Emmy news came in the form of a Best Director nomination for Cary Joji Fukunaga. Fukunaga’s stellar direction and haunting imagery was a staple of the first season and we’ve been ardent supporters of his work. Unfortunately he faces some serious competition from Neil Marshall, Vince Gilligan, and Carl Franklin — Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and House of Cards, respectively. It will be nice when we can finally wave goodbye to Breaking Bad from the competition, but that’s not the case this time around.

How did you do with the nominations? Were there any surprises or was it more “business as usual?”