The 2016 Emmy nominations were announced today, so you know what that means! It’s time to talk about which Emmy snub hurts the worst…And this year, it’s pretty much a no contest. One Emmy snub is WAY more painful than all of the rest combined.
While I acknowledge that Emmy voters have quite the difficult task in narrowing down the nominees from a plethora of praiseworthy programs, there is one person whose performance this past year was unlike anything I’ve ever encountered while watching a television series before. Yet, curiously, while looking through the list of this year’s nominees, I don’t see that person’s name.
Can someone please explain to me why Ramin Djawadi, the music composer for Game of Thrones since its inception, was not nominated for an Emmy for his outstanding work on this most recent season?
RELATED: See The Complete List of 2016 Emmy Nominations
Anyone who watched the season 6 finale of Game of Thrones was blown away — figuratively speaking, of course — by the awe-inspiring beauty of its opening score, “Light of the Seven.” In an episode that saw some major events from [SPOILERS] most of the cast being killed off in an explosion, a king killing himself, and a khaleesi finally (!) getting on a boat after years of dawdling, it certainly says something that the most buzzed about moment was the music. See for yourself:
The opening of the finale is one of the most beautiful pairings of a piece of music with visuals I’ve ever, ever experienced.
That’s not even accounting for the spectacular work he did all season, from the scenes of Daenerys burning down the Dothraki hut, or when she flies in with Drogon for the first time, to that heartbreaking Hodor moment in episode five. On a normal Game of Thrones season, Djawadi himself even noted that bigger pieces of music are normally saved for the later episodes, for the cinematic sequences and battle scenes, but this season was different in that it required him to compose big music moments throughout the entire season in a way that brilliantly paid off.
Djawadi has only been nominated for one Emmy previously for his work on Game of Thrones in 2014 (and two other times, for his composition work on Prison Break in 2006 and FlashForward in 2010). For him to have been omitted from this year’s nominations breaks my heart more than Margaery Tyrell’s death did.
Ramin Djawadi deserves better. In the meantime, “Light of the Seven” is available on Spotify, so we’ll just listen to it on repeat and feel all the feels to cope with this egregious snub.
This year’s nominees for Outstanding Music Composition For A Series (Original Dramatic Score) are Chris Bacon for Bates Motel, Duncan Thum for Chef’s Table, Paul Leonard-Morgan for Limitless, Sean P. Callery for Minority Report, Mac Quayle for Mr. Robot, and Abel Korzeniowski for Penny Dreadful.
