Canada had a pretty darn good night at Sunday night’s Emmy Awards.
The show started with “Schitt’s Creek” sweeping the comedy category, winning every acting award for comedy as well as the writing and directing honours. CBC even got a shoutout!
After the show’s first few wins, Emmys host Jimmy Kimmel started joking about what the show’s win might mean for lesser-known Canadian cities, like the Paris of the Prairies.
“They are very excited in Canada right now. There is chaos in the streets of Saskatoon,” he joked.
Which, naturally, the people of Saskatoon were willing to take to heart.
Canadian Sandra Oh, who was nominated for Best Actress in a Drama for her role in “Killing Eve” but lost to Zendaya, was clearly enjoying her fellow Canucks’ victories. She tweeted that Dan Levy was living up to Canadian stereotypes, and congratulating Annie Murphy by talking about how much she wanted to be at he cast’s Toronto Emmy Night party. You and us both, Sandra.
By the time “Schitt’s Creek” had fully triumphed, Kimmel felt the very American need to assert dominance in a way that Americans always assume will hurt Canadians the most: through hockey.
If only Canada had won one more Emmy, we could have traded it for a Stanley Cup, he joked, unnecessarily pointing out that a Canadian team hasn’t won the ultimate NHL trophy since the Montreal Canadiens won the hockey playoffs in 1993. It was a joke so good he felt the need to repeat it on Twitter, apparently.
The other Canadians who were featured on the show were, as Sandra Oh very likely noticed, self-deprecating. Tatiana Maslany, who grew up in Regina, and Will Arnett, from Toronto, were both featured in a segment about how actors were spending their time in quarantine.
Arnett was spending his time learning to understand his inner [bleeped word,] he deadpanned, sporting a quarantine mustache. People often tell him he’s a real [bleep,] but he didn’t know that about himself, so he’s learning about that side of himself.
And Maslany joked that she was making wine in her bathroom toilet, and that it was not good, as she took a big swig.
And even though Oh didn’t win, she was able to get a quiet but powerful message across.
She chose to war a silk lavender moto-style jacket with Korean letting stitched onto it. She may have looked dressed-down, but it held a lot of significance.
“Everybody’s used to having relationships and fittings with designers of a certain prominence – and this shift has forced me to reflect on who I am and how I express myself through clothes,” the actress told Vogue.
The jacket was designed for her by the Los Angeles label KORELIMITED, which has designed a number of Black Lives Matter T-shirts and hoodies.
“It’s in a royal purple colour — which is a super Korean colour and brings a certain mindset for me — and it says ‘Black Lives Are Precious’ in Korean writing, because the literal translation of Black Lives Matter is impossible in Korean,” Oh explained to the magazine.
“The characters have to be read top to bottom, right to left, [a traditional way of writing Korean script] and there are dashes, or taegukgi, lifted from the Korean flag, which represent celestial bodies and the natural elements and all of that good stuff. And then on the right there’s a mugunghwa [hibiscus], the national flower of Korea.”
Wearing something different in a year marked by so much tragedy felt like the right choice, she explained.
“We’re having to reconsider the whole system of awards shows and fashion and red carpets.”