The Iron Throne Proves its Mettle (See what we did there?)

Game of Thrones got 32 Emmy nominations for its final season, so naturally the George R. R. Martin fantasy series was large and in charge at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards this year. This weekend, the show racked up 10 wins out of the 18 for which it was nominated. This bodes well for next Sunday’s Primetime Emmys awards show, where it’s expected to do very well indeed.

Five of the awards, or half the total won by the show, were for the controversial episode The Long Night, which drew much criticism from fans who claimed the gloomy lighting made it hard to see what the heck was actually going on. Three of the five awards awards it won were for Sound Mixing, Score, and Music Composition.

HBO’s docudrama series Chernobyl also picked up seven awards. That puts HBO ahead of the game with a total of 25 awards, with Netflix close behind with 22 overall so far.

The Handmaid’s Tale also took home awards in both drama guest categories, which was the limit of its eligibility, since the show could only submit episodes from last year under the “hanging episodes” rule.

While wins in the Creative Arts awards don’t necessarily point toward Primetime successes, it’s hard to imagine the big winners here this weekend won’t be taking home some more gold come next Sunday. In fact, it seems like a given for Game of Thrones at least, given its record 32 nominations.

There are at least five other Game of Thrones related projects in the works at HBO, with three of them making actual progress. The most active one at the moment is a prequel series called The Long Night, set 300 years before the events of Game of Thrones when dragons ruled the land, and based on the George R. R. Martin novel Fire and Blood.

Other Awards for the Geeking World

The Netflix series Love, Death & Robots walked away with five awards: short form animated program, character animation, animation storyboard artist, animation production design, and animation background design.

The Netflix series Carmen San Diego picked up one award for animation background painting.

Seth Macfarlane took home one of the golden statues for Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance for 2019, for his work as the voices of Peter Griffin, Stewie Griffin, Brian Griffin, Glen Quagmire, Tom Tucker and Seamus on Family Guy, for the episode Con Heiress, on FOX.

Star Trek: Discovery was nominated in six different categories, but won only for Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup for a Series, Limited Series, Movie or Special, specifically for the episode If Memory Servies – though frankly, Doug Jones as Saru has been in pretty much every episode of the CBS All Access Star Trek series, so they could have picked any of them.

The Netflix series The Good Place received 7 nominations, but somehow didn’t take home a single trophy.

Outstanding original interactive program went to NASA’s Insights Mars Landing, from NASA TV and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA also earned Emmy affection on Saturday night when YouTube’s NASA and SpaceX: The Interactive Demo-1 Launch won the award for outstanding interactive program (SCIENCE!!)

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