There are some new faces among this year's nominees for the NAACP's Image Awards. Also included is former Passions star Tracey Ross, nominated for a ninth consecutive award. The Image Awards will air on FOX on Valentine's Day.
The NAACP has announced the nominees for the 39th Annual Image Awards. The NAACP Image Awards honors projects and individuals that promote diversity in the arts in television, recording, literature and motion pictures. The theme of this years show is Stand Up and Be Counted. During this crucial election year, the NAACP encourages everyone to be socially conscious and take a stand on critical human and civil rights issues.
As 2008 starts, many of daytime's drama series are taking steps to improve the diversity among their rosters. However, due to the overall lack of diversity among the soaps, the Image Awards do not feature nominations for Outstanding Daytime Drama Series. Instead, the awards focus on individual performers within the shows.
The nominees do not tend to change much from year to year. However, this year only four of the nominees received nominations last year. Compare that to the previous year when when four of the five nominees in the Outstanding Actor field were nominated the year before. Meanwhile, Passions star Tracey Ross (Eve Russell) has earned a ninth consecutive nomination for her work on the series.
The Young and the Restless has routinely dominated the Image Awards. In the past year, however, the top-rated CBS soap has shead much of its African-American cast members. Former Y&R stars Shemar Moore (ex-Malcolm Winters) was a winner for his work on The Young and the Restless for five consecutive years and Victoria Rowell (ex-Drucilla Winters) tallied a whopping 11 wins.
Here is the listing of soap-related nominees for this year's NAACP Image Awards. For a complete listing of all nominees, click here.
Outstanding Actor in a Daytime Drama Series
Bryton McClure (Devon Hamilton, The Young and the Restless) Kamar de los Reyes (Antonio Vega, One Life to Live) Kristoff St. John (Neil Winters, The Young and the Restless) Mykel Shannon Jenkins (Charlie Baker, The Bold and the Beautiful) Tobias Truvillion (One Live to Live)
Outstanding Actress in a Daytime Drama Series
Nazanin Boniadi (Leyla Mir, General Hospital) Brook Kerr (Whitney Russell, Passions) Christel Khalil (Lily Winters, The Young and the Restless) Tracey Ross (Eve Russell, Passions) Tika Sumpter (Layla Williamson, One Life to Live)
The 39th NAACP Image Awards will air live on Thursday, February 14th (8:00 10:00 p.m. ET/PT) on FOX.
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"If you were looking for something clever or witty or funny here, you've come to the wrong place."
Bryton didn't do a lot this year either, last year he won I think because of the deafness story but this year he has been pretty off to the side. At least Tobias had the racist storyline.
I'm going to go out on a bit of a limb here and say WHY I think Tobias was a bad choice. His character on OLTL was very misrepresentative of an educated African American (he went to college with Hugh, remember him?). I asked three college professors, close friends of ours, if a young black male, with at least an undergraduate degree, would still use street-wise accents and "gangsta" lingo, and they all said "absolutely not".
Two of our friends from NYC teach at large well-known post-secondary institutions, the third is a professor at another well-known university in the south. All said, independent of one another, that education knocks that tendency away, and none knew of a single person who continued to speak in the manner that TT had chosen, or was told to use.
I had made this comment about the Vincent character a long while back on a really large message board, and I was slammed hard and fast, hence my queries to friends. I stand by my original point, that TT is not a good candidate for an award based on his speech pattern.
I agree with that, he does poorly represent the black male. If I was an uneducated soap viewer I might think that all black men act that way despite the education.
