All of us crazy The Office fans were really hoping that Steve Carell would finally win the Emmy for Best Lead Actor in a Comedy Series this year because previously, he’d received a total of five nominations for his role of Michael Scott and lost each time… and so last night was his final chance to walk away with an award for his six years on the show. But since he lost the award to Jim Parsons for The Big Bang Theory (for a second time), Carell supporters are in an uproar this morning and are bombarding the Internet with claims Carell’s loss was the “snub” of the night, and maintaining that it’s completely ridiculous the Academy didn’t recognize him for building up such an iconic role.
But it turns out not even Carell was convinced that he’d finally be the the one to go onstage and forget everyone’s names during an acceptance speech. MTV News stopped him on the red carpet and asked him what he thought his chances were of taking the category, and he said “[Winning] would be a culmination of all my hopes and dreams. It would be great, but I’m putting my expectations on the fairly low side and just trying to enjoy it and see my friends. I haven’t seen my friends from The Office in a while, so that’s going to be fun.”
OH COME ON. Carell is fantastic and he should have won that award. As Deadline pointed out, Carell deserves heaps of credit for staying on The Office throughout the end of his contract (because he became a big star years ago, and it wouldn’t have been too difficult for him to bully his way out of it). Not to mention that he is a genuinely honorable actor with undeniable talent! And while I’m not claiming that Parsons is a bad guy, I AM claiming that Parsons is a bad guy and Carell deserved that award more than him. To Parsons’ credit, when he received the Emmy from Charlie Sheen, he called the experience “odd” (though some just chalked it up to seeing Charlie Sheen without a dead cat slung over his shoulder or something). But I prefer to believe Parsons was expecting the award would go to Steve Carell, because it’s much funnier to watch the boss of a company be terrible and find love and not be terrible than it is to watch a nerd be a nerd.
Sources: MTV, Deadline, Washington Post
