Emmy loves Oscar even more than we thought
Following up on an item posted earlier in the week about Emmy's love affair with Oscar (36 wins out of 156 nominations since 1981), I delved into the less-than-user-friendly Emmy database to see how the first 25 years of televised Academy Award ceremonies fared. With the telecast listed under variations of "Oscar" and "Academy Awards," the searching may have been tedious but the results were initially surprising — I dug up 2 more wins out of 11 nominations. However, the cumulative total of 38 Emmys makes the Oscarcast the most honored program in primetime history (besting "Frasier" by one). Thus we have a great new Hollywood irony: one showbiz award is now the biggest winner of another.
But why so few Emmy nods for some of the most glorious Oscar ceremonies?
The first two Oscar videocasts in 1953 and '54 may have been ratings hits but the early Emmy awards did not have a suitable category for them. The first nomination came for the third telecast in 1955 as a "Best Special Event or News Program," but the NBC show, hosted by Bob Hope in LA and Thelma Ritter in NYC, along with the World Series, the Rose Bowl, and even the Emmys, lost to the CBS coverage of the A-bomb tests. That Oscar night is remembered as much for who lost, Judy Garland in "A Star is Born," as for what won, "On the Waterfront" with 8 statues.
Until the early 1970s, the Emmys had a melange of categories and the Oscarcast did not seem to fit into any of them. It made a comeback with the 1972 ceremony ("The French Connection" was the big winner with 5 Oscars) getting two technical nods winning for lighting. Then only another nine nominations, including one win, Jack Haley, for producing the 51st ceremony in 1979 ("The Deer Hunter" won 5 Oscars), until the addition of many more categories in the early 1980s.
