Drag Race, Queer Eye, and Ricky Martin among LGBTI Emmy nominees

Drag Race, Queer Eye, and Ricky Martin among LGBTI Emmy nominees

The nominations for the 2018 Emmy Awards were announced overnight with a cluster of LGBTI creatives recognised for their work.

RuPaul’s Drag Race received 12 nominations across all categories, including for Outstanding Reality Competition Series and Outstanding Reality Host for RuPaul herself.

The Drag Race nominations were for the beginning of season 10, after the ninth season last year picked up four awards.

Netflix’s popular Queer Eye reboot received four nominations for Oustanding Structured Reality Series, as well as its casting, cinematography and editing.

The show’s grooming expert and general ray of sunshine Jonathan van Ness posted an adorable reaction to his being nominated for both Queer Eye and his phenomenally funny webseries, Gay of Thrones.

The biggest LGBTI winner in the nominations is American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, which has finally aired on Foxtel after a lengthy delay in bringing the series to our shores.

Versace was a massive critical success in the U.S., hailed for its nuanced and artful depiction of the often cancerous impact of internalised homophobia.

The limited series received 18 nominations overall, including for its lead, Glee‘s Darren Criss, Ricky Martin for his supporting performance as the murdered Versace’s boyfriend, and Penelope Cruz for playing Donatella.

Producer and director on the series, the prolific Ryan Murphy, was also nominated. Murphy’s other show currently airing, the acclaimed ’80s ballroom series Pose, is also currently in frustrating Foxtel limbo, with no planned airdate in sight.

Other queer performers nominated include Lily Tomlin, Evan Rachel Wood, Kate McKinnon, Wanda Sykes, Jane Lynch, Samira Wiley, Cherry Jones, and Sarah Paulson.

The fabulous Tituss Burgess was again nominated for his work on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Carrie Brownstein was nominated for directing part of the final season of Portlandia.

A post shared by Jonathan Van Ness (@jvn) on

Trans director Yance Ford, whose documentary Strong Island was Oscar-nominated earlier this year, received a nod for merit in documentary filmmaking here too (it’s available on Netflix; the streaming service likes to double dip with nominations sometimes).

Also picking up nominations were Ellen DeGeneres and the iconic Tim Gunn, alongside Heidi Klum, for hosting reality shows as well – making 4 of the 6 people nominated in the category LGBTI.

Other series, such as The Handmaid’s TaleGodlessSteven Universe and Killing Eve, which include queer stories also picked up nominations.

The biggest nominee this year, not unpredictably, is Game of Thrones, followed closely by another mega-budget HBO series Westworld.

This year’s nominations again suggest that the extreme volume of TV being made now enforces a formation of consensus around a cadre of the kinds of shows that everybody seems to watch, over more boundary-pushing, niche or experimental series.

The big snub of the nominations was the absence of Twin Peaks: The Return – far and away one of the most singular, watershed seasons of television produced this decade, or ever – from the Outstanding Limited Series nominees list, as well as its star Kyle MacLachlan for his multiple overlapping performances.

But hey, this is the awards show that is so uninterested in seeking out or rewarding new and different things that they only just stopped nominated Modern Family for Outstanding Comedy Series.

Emmys gonna Emmy. The winners will be announced at the ceremony which will air in Australia on September

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