The Daytime Emmy Awards: Go Thaao!

My apologies for not saying anything sooner about this, but it just kept slipping my mind—which as you’ve noticed has been focused solely on Bravo lately…

Tonight is the Daytime Emmy Awards where the best and brightest stars of soap operas, game shows and talk shows are honored. But more than a little controversy surrounds this year’s ceremony…

Now, let’s be honest. Award shows never please all the critics, but the criticism of this one has been extremely harsh over the past few months. Why? Because there are some new voting rules in the soap opera acting categories that have riled everyone up.

It’s a multi-step process that I may have wrong because it’s extremely complicated—way more that it should be—but I’ll do my best to explain it. Basically, before this year, each show pre-nominated two actors for each category—making them the only actors from the show eligible for nominations (If you’re thinking that might have gotten ugly behind-the-scenes, you’re right, based on some stories I’ve read.). Then those pre-nominees were sent to the Academy and the top vote-getters in each category were made the nominees. Then, tapes of the nominees were sent to the voters who chose the winner.

This year, however, the Academy eliminated the second vote, meaning that tapes of all the pre-nominees were sent to the Academy members and the top vote-getter in each category after the pre-nominations is in fact the winner.

What’s the controversy? Critics are concerned that since this process made so many tapes to view, no one actually watched them and they simply voted based on name recognition, loyalty to show or any other reason besides the actual material. The critics argue that this process kept some lesser known actors from being nominated and that it may mean the winners were not chosen fairly.

Quite frankly, I can’t disagree. However, I am SO excited about one of the nominees that I’m willing to look over it.

The dashing Thaao Penghlis received a nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor for his portrayal of Tony/Andre on “Days of Our Lives.” Now, if you follow the Daytime Emmys, you know that “Days” never receives any acting nominations, so if these new rules allowed a deserving actor like Penghlis to be nominated, I’m okay with it.

Now, I honestly don’t think Penghlis has a snowball’s chance of winning—especially with David Canary (“All My Children”) in the running—but his nomination does offer some hope and I wish him the best of luck tonight.

By the way, the voting is not the only controversy surrounding this year’s awards. The telecast itself is also slightly controversial. ABC cut the show to two hours this year. The network says that it wanted to spotlight its new SOAPNet show, “MVP,” by airing it after the awards. But most people agree that ABC just didn’t want a three-hour spotlight for CBS, which dominated this year’s nominations.

The Daytime Emmy Awards hosted by Cameron Mathison (“All My Children”) and Sherri Shepherd (“The View”) air tonight (Friday) at 8 p.m. on ABC…