What are the Emmy Awards?

The Emmy Awards is a ceremony held in America in recognition of various sections of television and broadband programmes, which include the Television Academy and the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, programmes like daytime, sports, news and documentary pieces.

The founder of the Emmy awards was Syd Cassyd in 1948.

Although the Emmy name derived from a suggestion by Harry Lubcke, a former television engineer and third academy president who wanted to use the name Immy, as this was a term used for the image orthicon tube used in early cameras.

However, it was changed to the more feminine name Emmy as this related to the female statuette, which was the design of a television engineer named Louis McManus, it showed a winged woman holding an atom.  This was to symbolise the status of the uplifting form of art and science in television.

Emmy Award

It now costs around $400 to make an Emmy statuette and takes five-and-a-half hours of labour to create. They are made at R.S. Owens of Chicago.  After the employees have molded the statuette they then carefully hand paint each figure in copper, nickel, silver, and gold.

2018 is the 70th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony, and the annual event normally take place during September.

The first ever Emmy Award ceremony was held on 25th January 1949 at the Hollywood Athletic Club in Los Angeles, California and was hosted by Walter O’Keefe.

The first Emmy to be awarded went to Shirley Dinsdale and her puppet Judy Splinters for the Most Outstanding Television Personality.

There are many different categories within the Academy Awards ceremony, which include the Prime time Emmy Awards, the Creative Arts and the Engineering Emmy Awards.

Lorne Michaels has been nominated for the most individual Emmy Awards of all time for his creation of Saturday Night Live, a total of 78 nominations so far and was nominated for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series for SNL in 2017.

Since it was broadcast 42 year ago, Saturday Night Live has been nominated 231 nominations and has come away with 52 awards. This makes the show the most nominated one in Emmy history.

However, the person who has collected the most Emmy Awards to date is HBO Documentary Films president Sheila Nevins.  She has a total of 30 Emmy Awards, compared to Lorne Michaels’s 14 awards.

If an Emmy winner wants to take their award statuette home they have to pay the $400 to do so.