By Kristyne McDaniel

The Emmy awards take place each year, with nominees in each category hoping to become the winner of that award. Have you ever wondered how the nominees are chosen for the Emmy Awards? Members of the television industry pay to be a member of the Academy. One of the perks is the right to cast their vote for award programs including the Emmy’s.

There are over 12,000 members of the Academy and each one belongs to a particular peer group. This is the area that they are considered to be an expert in so that is the category they are allowed to cast their votes in for the Emmy’s. Since the voters are members of the television industry, winning an Emmy is a huge honor because it means that others in the industry value your hard work and dedication.

Ballots are mailed out to the Academy members each year with a deadline for returning them. Once that deadline has passed, all the ballots are tallied up. The top five in each category with the most votes become part of the nominee process.

However, the Emmy nomination process has been under scrutiny for years, claiming that they don’t feel most of the Academy members even watch the items of the ballot; they simply choose what is familiar to them or who they like to hang out with. With this in mind, changes were made to the nomination process for the 2006 Emmy Awards.

This new process allows the Academy members to continue submitting their ballots as before. A new step then comes into play called The Blue Ribbon where the top three or four nominees in each category are chosen from the totals of the ballots submitted. The remaining one or two nominees in each category will be determined by the Blue Ribbon panel after the have reviewed the films as a group.

The goal of this addition to the process is to ensure some new faces and names find their way into the Emmy nominations. This will prevent the show from becoming too predictable or for a particular show to dominate the Emmy winners list year after year as has been the scenario in years past.