LOS ANGELES: “Game of Thrones” will seek to make Emmy history one final time Sunday when television’s best and brightest gather at a glamorous ceremony in Los Angeles to bid farewell to a number of long-running hit shows.
Despite its misfiring finale which divided fans, the fantasy epic about feuding families and flame-shooting dragons secured a whopping 32 nominations for this year’s Emmys — television’s version of the Oscars.
The most decorated fictional show in Emmys history, “Thrones” has twice won 12 awards in a single season.
It is well on its way to besting that record this year, with 10 awards already bagged in lesser categories at last week’s Creative Arts Emmys, including for the show’s blockbuster special effects and mock-medieval swords-and-bodices costumes.
It is the overwhelming favorite to add the top drama series prize to its haul on Sunday.
“All signs point to ‘Game of Thrones’ picking that up,” predicted Variety’s Michael Schneider.
“Even if fans weren’t necessarily loving that final season ... it doesn’t matter — if the voters love it, then that’s what’s going to win the Emmy,” he added.
The Television Academy’s 24,000-plus voters had two weeks in August to pick their favorites.
To get across the line Sunday, “Thrones” has 14 contenders across seven categories.
Serial winner Peter Dinklage is a front-runner for sharp-tongued dwarf Tyrion Lannister, as is Maisie Williams as princess-turned-assassin Arya Stark.
Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) and Kit Harington (Jon Snow) are among the others in the running.
“Thrones” was not just a critical hit but a sweeping cultural phenomenon — more than 40 million tuned in to watch each episode of the final season.
Emmys organizers, who have copied the Oscars by eschewing a host this year, will hope that such wild popularity lifts the ceremony’s viewing figures.
All 10 “Thrones” acting nominees will serve as guest presenters — as will the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Stiller and the Kardashians.
Further star power among the acting nominees will be provided by Oscar-winners Michael Douglas, Olivia Colman, Mahershala Ali and Patricia Arquette.
Amazon’s “The Marvelous Mrs.Maisel” and HBO’s “Chernobyl” have also emerged as powerhouse contenders.
“Mrs Maisel” — Amazon’s story of a 1950s housewife-turned-stand up comic — won the best comedy Emmy last year, and the second season is well-placed to add further prizes Sunday.
It is locked in a fierce showdown for the overall comedy gong with “Veep” and “Fleabag.”
Like “Thrones,” US political satire “Veep” is contending its final Emmys after a stellar run, including 17 statuettes.
The show won best comedy in 2015, 2016 and 2017, but took a forced hiatus last year as Julia Louis-Dreyfus battled breast cancer.
She would claim the standalone record for acting Emmys with a ninth win.
Another long-running popular show taking its final Emmys bow is “The Big Bang Theory,” the throwback sitcom about a group of geeky, young California scientists.
It earned only one nomination — for directing — but its creators are unlikely to mind after all 12 seasons were purchased by HBO Max streaming service this week for a reported $500 million.
In the limited series categories, “Chernobyl,” HBO’s drama about the 1986 nuclear disaster, won seven technical Emmys last weekend. It even inflicted a rare defeat on “Thrones” in production design.
But it may struggle to add to that tally on Sunday, when it competes with Netflix’s “When They See Us,” the searing true story of five men wrongly accused of raping a Central Park jogger, which has eight acting nominations.
In the variety sections, HBO’s political satire “Last Week Tonight” starring British comedian John Oliver is again front-runner, while NBC’s all-time leading Emmys winner “Saturday Night Live” remains formidable.
National Geographic’s “Free Solo” does not compete Sunday, but scooped an impressive seven Emmys last weekend.
The Oscar-winning documentary about a hair-raising, free solo climb of El Capitan in California’s Yosemite swept the non-fiction categories.
‘Game of Thrones’ seeks record in final Emmys battle
‘Game of Thrones’ seeks record in final Emmys battle
- ‘Game of Thrones’ has twice won 12 awards in a single season
- ‘Game of Thrones’ was not just a critical hit but a sweeping cultural phenomenon
Sotheby’s ‘Origins II’: Local heroes go under the hammer
- Regional highlights from Sotheby’s ‘Origins II’ auction, which takes place Jan. 31 in Diriyah
DUBAI: Here are some of the regional highlights from Sotheby’s ‘Origins II’ auction, which takes place Jan. 31 in Diriyah.
Mohamed Siam
‘Untitled (Camel Race)’
Siam is described by Sotheby’s as “one of the most significant voices of the Kingdom’s second generation of modern artists.” His “highly discernible visual aesthetic,” the auction catalogue states, references European cubists and Italian Futurism, using “multiple overlapping planes to create an endless sense of movement” — an approach that “fragments visual reality, enabling the viewer to experience multiple viewpoints simultaneously.” This work from the late 1980s “shrewdly captures through a fractured, shifting perspective two camel riders in an enthralling, head-to-head race.” It marks Siam’s auction debut and is expected to fetch between $70,000 and $90,000.
Abdulhalim Radwi
‘Untitled (Hajj Arafah)’
The Makkah-born artist is one of Saudi modernism’s most significant figures. His “multifaceted practice was shaped by a profound engagement with regional heritage and the evolving aesthetic currents of the 20th century,” the catalogue notes. This 1967 oil painting is hailed by Sotheby’s as “a vibrant example of Radwi’s practice (at the time), depicting a bustling arrangement of tented structures rendered in his characteristic Cubist-inflected idiom. The tightly interlocking forms, rhythmic repetitions, and cool, airy palette evoke the temporal architecture of the Hajj pilgrimage, distilled into a kaleidoscopic composition that celebrates the textures and visual poetry of life in Makkah.”
Mohammed Al-Saleem
‘Untitled’
Another of the Kingdom’s modern-art pioneers, Al-Saleem was born in 1939 in Al-Marat province. His work, Sotheby’s says, “is celebrated for its distinct visual language, a style which the artist coined ‘Horizonism.’ Drawing inspiration from the shifting sands and gradating skyline of Riyadh as seen from the desert, as well as the intensity of the Saudi sun, Al-Saleem reimagined his beloved landscape through the prism of abstraction.” In works such as this 1989 oil painting, he “replaced the traditional horizon line with stylized forms resembling organic forms and Arabic calligraphy … a fusion of modernist abstraction and cultural identity.”
Taha Al-Sabban
‘Untitled’
This mixed-media-on-canvas work from 2005 typifies the Makkah-born artist’s modernist approach, which, Sotheby’s states “has been described as both an act of conservation and a homage to the nature and culture of his homeland.” The artist “used expressive color and form to preserve local memory — palm groves, open waters, and traditional architecture — while transforming the traditional cityscape into ascending, abstracted rhythms.” His work is often described as “nostalgic,” but the Al-Sabban is quoted by the Al-Mansouria Foundation as saying: “Although I am acutely aware of the passage of time, my aim is not nostalgia; instead I seek to capture the moment and reveal the life in the world.”
Zeinab Abd El-Hamid
‘Untitled (Shisha Shop)’
This 1987 watercolor is the work of one of Egypt’s most significant female artists of the modern era who belonged, Sotheby’s says “to a generation of artists who came of age during the cultural reawakening that followed Egypt’s independence.” Abd El-Hamid, the catalogue states, “painted with a refined sensibility, grounded in her belief in humanity’s ability to transcend hardship. She did not seek to romanticize the past, but to distill its forms and emotions into something enduring. Her work carries a sense of nostalgia for a rhythm of life rooted in shared dignity and poetic structure … rooftops, cafés, and courtyards become vessels of memory, harmony, and inner light.”
Samia Halaby
‘Copper’
Central to the Palestinian artist’s practice was the belief that “abstraction, like any visual language, is shaped by social forces and reflects the movements of working people and revolutionary ideas,” Sotheby’s states. This 1976 oil painting combines Halaby’s exploration of the diagonal as “a dynamic formal element” and of the reflective properties of metals. The work “eschews traditional linear perspective in favor of a compositional strategy that flattens and destabilizes the viewer’s gaze. Halaby achieves a sense of spatial infinity — not through illusion, but through repetition and variation.”
Mahmoud Sabri
‘Demonstration’
The Iraqi painter’s career, Sotheby’s says, was unique among his peers in his homeland. “He simultaneously explored Arab and European cultures, studied the history of painting, and created his own unique art language and style.” That language arrived after this particular oil painting from the early Sixties, a time in which “Sabri often returned to the subject of revolutionary martyrdom and probably referring to the events of the 1963 coup d’état.” In the foreground, a group of women surround a bereaved mother, who is weeping for her murdered son.
