It’s a tight call: which of the major performance awards are the most biased and meaningless? Even after the Oscars went completely DEI the Emmy Awards were the clear winner of the Most Partisan and Biased Awards Award, but this time the voters outdid themselves.

Billy Bob Thornton is one of the most versatile and interesting actors alive. Actors of his caliber traditionally stay away from television though that tendency is breaking down rapidly now: aging super-stars like Nicole Kidman have been making one streaming series after another. Billy Bob is the star of “Landman,” easily one of the best series on TV, and the latest season of the show (that’s the trailer for the next one above) gave him an especially fine showcase for his talents. Yet he was not nominated for an Emmy, and neither was “Landman.”

The reason was, simply, politics. Taylor Sheridan, the creator of “Landman,” “Tulsa King,” “Yellowstone” and all of “Yellowstone’s” excellent spinoffs, tells stories that embrace conservative values and characters like Billy Bob’s Texas oil man. Today’s Hollywood neither likes those values or the nation that birthed them. The partisan bias is undeniable: Even the reliable Axis mouthpiece Esquire noticed and objected.