At the 91st annual Academy Awards in February 2019, Free Solo won best documentary, capping off a widely successful theatrical run that started at the prior year’s Toronto International Film Festival and led to more than $28 million in global grosses.
At the 71st annual Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards seven months later, the National Geographic release also won all seven of the awards for which it was nominated, including best director for a nonfiction or documentary program for filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. “It’s incredible to see the Academy appreciates the hard work that went into it,” Vasarhelyi said backstage at the time.
But going forward, appreciation won’t be enough for films like Free Solo to win Emmy Awards—at least, not if they were already nominated for an Academy Award. On Thursday, the Television Academy announced a rule change that will bar any Oscar-nominated films from later emerging at the Emmys.
“The Television Academy supports the recent decision from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to allow feature films, originally intended for theatrical distribution but made available via streaming or video on demand during the current pandemic crisis, to compete at the 2021 Oscars,” the Emmys organization said in a statement. “Further, the Television Academy ruled in March that effective in 2021, programs that have been nominated for an Oscar will no longer be eligible for the Emmys competition.”
Last month, the Oscars announced an emergency rules change that broadly stipulated movies could be eligible for Academy Awards even if they were not released theatrically—for this year only. So in theory, without this subsequent change by the Television Academy, it’s possible the 2021 Emmy Awards ceremony could have included a lot of feature films bumped to streaming services that wouldn’t normally have been eligible for TV awards. (Sorry, Wes Anderson: only Oscars for you!)
In the past, the most overlap between the Emmys and Oscars has occurred in the documentary space: just two years before Free Solo double-dipped on awards season, O.J.: Made in America, a multi-part ESPN event series that enjoyed a small theatrical release before finding broad success on television, won at both ceremonies as well.
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