While we’re reforming award shows, Hey award shows! Nominate some animated projects in your “regular” categories!!!

BoJack Horseman was never nominated for a major award in a non-animated category. We regularly landed on critics’ best-of-the-year (and best-of-the-decade) lists, but when it was time to pick the best comedies at the TCA and Critics Choice Awards, I guess we slipped their minds?

At the Emmys, they make you choose whether to submit for Best Comedy OR Best Animated (a category presented on a different, non-televised night). Toy Story 3 can be one of the best animated movies AND one of the best movies at The Oscars, but that’s too wild a notion for Emmy.

Every year we debated submitting in Comedy instead of Animation, but there’s also a rule that if you switch, you can’t switch back, and it always felt too risky, given we couldn’t get traction in non-animated categories at any other awards.

AND THEN THERE ARE THE GUILD AWARDS. I think our actors did some of the best work of any actors on television, but none were nominated for non-VA acting awards by SAG-AFTRA or anyone else.

“But comparing voice acting to on-camera acting is like apples and oranges!” Oh, and comparing The Big Bang Theory to Nurse Jackie isn’t? That’s the whole fun of award shows!

At the WGA awards, if your drama, comedy, limited series, or new series gets nominated, the whole writing staff gets the nomination, but for some reason, the animation category is episodic, so only the writer of one specific episode gets to win!

I’ve gone to multiple WGA awards and watched full staffs celebrate their wins together, but on animated shows (just as collaborative!), one person wins and the staff stays home!

This leads to weird situations where four different Simpsons episodes crowd out the category, when, if it was by show, all those writers could have been nominated together as well as the staffs of four different shows!

Finally, it makes the field of animation writing seem even more homogenous. AFAIK, the first woman to win the WGA award for TV animation was in 2017; the first non-white person was this year. If the whole staffs were nominated, these milestones would’ve been reached years ago.

Anyway, I know how dumb it is to complain about awards I didn’t win, when there are so many worse things happening (even in the world of awards) but these are real publicity opportunities that can help under-seen gems cut through the clutter and celebrate artists doing good work.