La politique s’est imposée dimanche aux Emmy Awards, où ont été distingués la série télévisée « Homeland » et son complot terroriste, ainsi que le téléfilm « Game Change » et son portrait de l’ex-égérie républicaine Sarah Palin lors de la campagne présidentielle américaine de 2008.
La dream team de Homeland-Photo:DR-
En cette année électorale aux Etats-Unis, qui choisiront leur président le 6 novembre prochain, les membres de l’Académie des Arts et Sciences du cinéma ont semblé préféré les thématiques contemporaines au stylisme rétro de « Mad Men ». La série, qui était nommée dans 17 catégories et faisait figure de favorite pour remporter son cinquième Emmy consécutif de meilleure série dramatique – le plus convoité de la soirée -est repartie bredouille dimanche, s’inclinant face à « Homeland », couronnée dès sa première saison. Cette brillante série, produite par la chaîne payante Showtime met aux prises un agent féminin de la CIA et un militaire américain soupçonné de préparer un attentat terroriste contre les Etats-Unis. « Homeland », dont la 2e saison commence à la fin du mois aux Etats-Unis, a également valu à ses deux acteurs principaux, Claire Danes et le Britannique Damian Lewis, les trophées d’interprétation dans une série dramatique. La politique est également au coeur de « Game Change », diffusée sur la chaîne à péage HBO, qui a remporté le trophée du meilleur téléfilm pour sa description de la campagne républicaine à l’élection présidentielle de 2008, à travers le portrait de Sarah Palin, ex-égérie conservatrice et co-listère de John McCain.
Julianne Moore, heureuse et…élue
Le rôle a valu à Julianne Moore, à la composition stupéfiante, le premier Emmy de sa carrière, face notamment à Nicole Kidman. « Je me sens validée (dans le rôle) car Sarah Palin a dit qu’elle n’aimait pas le film », a ironisé l’actrice, dans une audacieuse robe jaune canari. « Game Change » a également remporté les Emmys du scénario et de la réalisation. Côté comédie, « Modern Family » et ses clichés gentillets sur les familles « modernes »-gays et mixtes, notamment , a conservé son titre de meilleur série comique, pour la troisième année consécutive. Les trophées de meilleurs acteur et actrice comiques sont allés à Jon Cryer pour « Mon Oncle Charlie » — qui avait gagné en 2009 le trophée du meilleur second rôle pour la même série — et Julia Louis-Dreyfus pour « Veep », où l’actrice révélée par « Seinfeld » incarne la vice-présidente des Etats-Unis. A l’instar de Julianne Moore, les stars de cinéma ont régné sans partage sur les prix d’inteprétation pour téléfilms ou mini-séries: Kevin Costner a remporté le trophée du meilleur acteur pour la série historique « Hatfields & McCoys » et Jessica Lange a été recompensée pour le second rôle féminin pour son personnage de voisine fouineuse et inquiétante dans la série « American Horror Story ». La cérémonie, retransmiseáà 17h (00h00 GMT) sur la chaîne ABC (groupe Disney) depuis le Nokia Theater à Los Angeles, a débuté avec une série de blagues du présentateur de la soirée, Jimmy Kimmel, qui n’a pas résisté, lui non plus, à faire référence à l’élection américaine. Il a ainsi salué la série britannique « Downtown Abbey » et sa description des relations entre une famille d’aristocrates et leurs serviteurs, estimant que cela donnait une idée de « la façon dont on vit dans la famille de Mitt Romney », le candidat républicain à la Maison Blanche. Il a également ironisé sur la présence de nombreux Britanniques parmi les nommés, due selon lui, au fait qu’on découvre « les acteurs britanniques dans les pièces de Shakespeare et les américains dans les centres commerciaux ». Les Emmy Awards, remis par l’Académie des Arts et Sciences de la Télévision, sont les récompenses les plus prestigieuses de la télévision américaine. AFP
L’actrice Julianne Moore, récipiendaire d’un Emmy très mérité-Photo:DR-
The Emmys’ Balancing Act: Predictable, Except When Not
Claire Danes raises the Emmy award for outstanding lead actress in a drama series for her role in Homeland-photo: All rights reserved-
Predictable can be bad, but not necessarily. The Daily Show is a deserving winner, and it’s been energized in the current election year. Other awards last night gave a sense of the academy on autopilot, rewarding seemingly because they were familiar titles, fit familiar molds or had familiar stars. And still others were actual, deserving surprises.
The Emmy broadcast itself was a pretty familiar and efficient affair, chugging along crisply and coming in on time, workmanlike if not really memorable. In Jimmy Kimmel, the new host, we got not Kimmel the bomb-thrower but Kimmel the TV pro. He got in some zingers at the stars and the medium (TV’s inventor, Philo Farnsworth, he said, was responsible for Honey Boo Boo–”so nice job, dumbass”) but he and the producers did not set out to reinvent the format.
So there was a presenting segment with Ricky Gervais, but no real Gervaisian fireworks. There was a skit re-creating Breaking Bad in the form of the Andy Griffith credits—funny, but the Breaking-Bad-as-sitcom gag is already an old one. (Even the last Emmys had a sketch with Jesse Pinkman in the offices of Dunder-Mifflin from The Office.) Another funny bit—Julia Louis-Dreyfus “accidentally” getting her acceptance speech switched with Amy Poehler’s, recalled last year’s group best-actress sketch, in which Poehler led her fellow nominees in a “beauty pageant.”
Kimmel—who has made social-media pranks a big feature of his late-night show—tried something new by inviting viewers to tweet out a hoax that Tracy Morgan had passed out on stage, a stunt that generated a flood of traffic on Twitter but didn’t have much payoff on the TV screen. (Though Morgan gamely stayed flat on the stage through the commercial break.) The opening skit was most notable for a shocker sight gag with Lena Dunham of HBO’s Girls, naked in a toilet stall eating a cake (reminiscent of Girls itself, in which her character Hannah has a fondness for eating cupcakes in the bathroom), but the effect was probably undercut by the fact that most ABC viewers may have had no idea who Dunham was.
That last bit (suggested, reportedly, by Dunham herself), appearing at the opening of the primetime Emmys, is something of a microcosm of the state of TV today. To many viewers, a guy naked and eating on the can might be weird gross-out humor; but a woman doing the same thing might hit them as bizarre, wrong, offensive, reason to change the channel. That space–the notion of a woman owning her body comedically, and awareness of the conventions it pushes against–is where much of Girls’ humor lives, and that humor is not for everyone.
And it’s Emmy-nominated: as are Louis CK’s rants about mortality and masturbation and Breaking Bad’s photorealistic portrait of a drug dealer’s soul. On the one hand, much of the best TV today is on shows with intensely devoted, but relatively small audiences, largely on cable. The broadcast networks—which after all air the Emmys—produce shows with bigger audiences, but generally less creative ambition. And the Emmys has to bring all this stuff together, the niche and the mass, both as awards subjects and as the stuff of a big mainstream primetime broadcast.
The way Emmy has divvied this up, awards-wise, is largely to cede the drama categories to cable, while keeping comedy as the last redoubt of broadcast. The drama awards this year offered some of the bigger surprises and new winners, even if they were largely from the same show. Homeland unseated Mad Men as best drama, and Damian Lewis dethroned Bryan Cranston as best actor, while Claire Danes deservedly won the actor award. (Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul did pick up a supporting win, though sadly over the even more deserving Giancarlo Esposito.) As for Homeland—I don’t think it was the best drama of the past season, but it was the best new drama of the last season, and I’m happy enough to see this terrific show get its first trip to the podium.
Cable has made a lot of strong, form-breaking comedies the past few years (Archer, Louie, Girls, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Curb Your Enthusiasm…), but it’s the one area in which the big networks can still compete, and the one in which Emmy voters–largely veterans of old-fashioned broadcast TV–mostly choose to reward the big broadcasters. (Though they passed over the worthy but low-rated Community and Parks and Recreation for the Best Comedy category.) They did so mostly in the form of now-perennial winner Modern Family: best comedy, best supporting actor for Eric Stonestreet, best supporting actress for Julie Bowen. Jon Cryer[!] won best actor for CBS stalwart Two and a Half Men, while Louis-Dreyfus won for HBO’s Veep (but, one suspects, also largely for having been a network-TV star on Seinfeld, as well as The New Adventures of Old Christine, for which she also won an Emmy). There was a bit of new blood in the welcome wins of Louis CK for comedy writing (for his brilliant FX series) and variety writing (for his standup special), though he was surprisingly subdued as a winner and presenter.
Then there were the Everything Else categories—besides the variety-show award for The Daily Show, there was reality (The Amazing Race, again) and movies and miniseries. The latter category, by nature, doesn’t allow Emmy to give the award to a multiple past winner, but it did follow some familiar patterns, giving awards to a movie star (Kevin Costner) and a high-profile HBO movie, Game Change, which with its caricature of Sarah Palin was not exactly politically uncomfortable for Hollywood. (Disclosure: the movie was based on a book by TIME’s Mark Halperin, along with John Heilemann.)
In all, though, it was at least a fun, nicely paced, competent Emmycast–sort of the Modern Family of awards shows. (That is, not interested in changing much of what it had done in the past few years, not the most breathtaking TV you’ll watch this season, but still capable of delivering a laugh.) And in fact it was fitting that, even as Modern Family the show seemed to be coasting last season (its first season was genuinely excellent, but it often repeats itself now), the show and its cast gave the night some of its best moments. A sketch in which the child actress who plays Lily is portrayed as a holy terror was better material than she had all last season, producer Steve Levitan gives a reliably witty acceptance, and Bowen gave a hilarious speech in which she thanked “the censors at ABC for insisting on nipple covers.”
Really, for better or worse, the Emmys not so much about recognizing not so much TV’s absolute best as it is about negotiating a balance between TV’s actual best–its most ambitious stuff–and the stuff that gets a big audience (which can overlap but often doesn’t). That was the kind of broadcast Emmy, and Kimmel, gave us. It was often predictable. But after all, isn’t predictability a big part of TV too? In http://www.time.com
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