This year's Daytime Emmy Awards ceremony was set to be especially glitzy, with a brand-new event logo, updated rules to match modern viewing habits, an extra night of celebration, and its very own digital streaming channel. Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic has affected how some of those big plans the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) laid out earlier this year will play out. It has also pushed back the announcement of official nominees.
In a new interview, NATAS CEO and President Adam Sharp -- one of the key minds behind all of the event's modernizing steps -- says that fans can look forward to finding out which actors have made it to the nomination round in an official announcement slated for early to mid-May. (As a reminder, the pre-nomination process was fully scrapped this year.)
"We extended our judging window somewhat to account for [the current health concerns]," he tells Soaps of why the announcement won't be taking place in April. "We're still figuring out how it'll be presented; obviously it'll be virtual, so a mix of press release and social media."
Sharp also clears up some of the confusion around whether the Daytime Emmy Awards ceremony has been postponed or fully canceled, as the original release stated it had been put on hold indefinitely.
"Sports, Technology & Engineering, and Daytime Emmys are officially postponed. The hope is we will be able to put those on this year in the format and form people are used to," he says. "For the Daytime Emmys, it's a little more difficult. There were simply no other dates we could present in the usual form. There'll be a mix of some online and virtual elements, but the hope is that things return to some form of normal in a time frame that allows us to do some live events as well. But however you slice it, the ceremonies will take a different form than originally planned."
Which actors do you think will be officially nominated for Daytime Emmy Awards this year? How do you feel about the way NATAS is handling the obstacles presented by the COVID-19 pandemic? We want to hear from you -- so drop your comments in the Comments section below, tweet about it on Twitter, share it on Facebook, or chat about it on our Message Boards.
