Former President Barack Obama won his first Emmy at the 2022 Creative Arts Emmys ceremony, becoming the second president to win an award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
Obama took home the trophy for Outstanding Narrator for his work on the Netflix docuseries Our Great National Parks​​​​​​​ Episode 1, "A World of Wonder," directed by Sarah Peat. He follows former President Dwight Eisenhower, who won the Governors Award in the 1956 ceremony. An honorary accolade, the Governors Award is given to an "individual, company or organization that has made a profound, transformational, and long-lasting contribution to the arts and/or science of television."
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Obama beat out Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Black Patriots: Heroes of the Civil War), David Attenborough (The Mating Game), W. Kamau Bell (We Need to Talk About Cosby) and Lupita Nyong'o (Serengeti II). Our National Parks was also nominated for Outstanding Cinematography for a Nonfiction Program (Christiaan Muñoz-Salas and Ignacio Walker for "Chilean Patagonia") but lost to HBO's 100 Foot Wave (Mike Prickett and Laurent Pujol for "Chapter IV: Dancing with God").
Our National Parks is a five-episode docuseries that follows the former president as he explores the United States' nature reserves and wildlife. The series is part of a larger deal between Netflix and Higher Ground Productions, Barack and Michelle Obama's production company. Other projects they have been involved in include American Factory, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, Crip Camp and Becoming. The Obamas also have a podcasting deal with Spotify and have produced The Michelle Obama Podcast, Renegades: Born in the USA and The Big Hit Show.
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Other notable wins at the Creative Arts Emmys include Aracane for Outstanding Animated Program for the episode "When These Walls Come Tumbling Down," Love, Death + Robots for Outstanding Short Form Animated Program for the short "Jibaro" and Chadwick Boseman for Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance for his work in the What If...? episode "What If. T'Challa Became a Star-Lord?"
"When I learned that Chad was nominated for this award, I started thinking about everything that was going on when he was recording-everything that was going on in the world and in our world and just being in such awe of his commitment and his dedication," Chadwick's wife, Taylor Simone Ledward, said while accepting the award. "And what a beautifully aligned moment it really is that one of the last things he would work on would not only be revisiting a character that was so important to him and his career and to the world, but also that it be an exploration of something new, diving into a new potential future."
Source: Deadline