Emmy Awards 2016: TV academy highlights racial diversity
Where the Oscars are struggling to fix their much-discussed race problem, the Emmys appear to be doing just fine.
“Game of Thrones” and “Veep” may have taken hom the top prizes -- for best drama and comedy series, respectively -- but racial diversity was proudly on display across several categories Sunday night for the 68th annual Primetime Emmy Awards, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel.
Kimmel kicked off the night by teasing the insider Hollywood crowd about the diversity issue, but the results proved that Academy voters are paying attention.
“The only thing we value more than diversity is congratulating ourselves on how much we value diversity,” Kimmel joked.
One of the biggest winners of the night was the FX miniseries “The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” which won for Outstanding Limited Series, with acting awards going to stars Courtney B. Vance and Sterling K. Brown.
Among the other notable diverse winners were Rami Malek, taking home Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series for “Mr. Robot,” and Regina King, winning for the second year in a row for “American Crime.”
On the comedy side, Comedy Central’s “Key and Peele” won for Outstanding Sketch Series, while Netflix’s “Master of None” took home Outstanding Comedy Series Writing for scribes Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang.
During his acceptance speech, Yang made a point about representation in media, noting that Italian-Americans and Asian-Americans make up just about equal portions of the U.S. population, though there is a proud tradition of Italian-American film and TV, while Asian-Americans “have Long Duck Dong” from “Sixteen Candles.”
“Asian parents out there, just a couple of you get your kids cameras instead of violins and we’ll be all good,” Yang said about encouraging diverse voices in TV and filmmaking.