Former US President, Barrack Obama, and Kenyan actress, Lupita Nyong’o, are primed as the favourites to win the Emmy awards in the Outstanding Narrator category.
The primetime Emmy Awards will be held on Tuesday, September 13, but the organisers already released the nomination list with Obama and Lupita leading in their group.
Obama was nominated for his feature and narration on the Netflix documentary series Our Great National Parks, a series on discovering the power of the planet's greatest national parks and wild spaces.
The documentary was produced by Obama and former First Lady Mitchell Obama’s production company, Higher Grounds.
Lupita was nominated for her voice-over artistry on Serengeti II, a wildlife documentary on Tanzania’s national park.
"We were nominated for an Emmy! Thank you for recognizing my narration of Serengeti II in today’s nominations. I love being part of a show that inspires me to get outside wherever I am," Lupita appreciated.
Her role in the feature sparked uproar in Kenya, with locals accusing her of promoting a neighbouring country’s tourism industry rather than her own.
Months before her endorsement, Kenya had appointed British model, Naomi Campbell, as Magical Kenya International Tourism ambassador, eliciting mixed reactions.
"I know everybody is asking why not Lupita (as Kenya's tourism goodwill ambassador). She has commitments and her managers cannot allow us to access her. We have spent the last five years looking for her," Tourism CS, Najib Balala, stated at the time.
Obama, the 44th US President, is a Grammy Award and Nobel Peace prize winner. He won 2008’s Grammy in the Spoken Word Album category for narrating his book The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.
Actress Lupita is an Oscars Academy Award winner for her feature film debut in 12 Years a Slave (2013). She has also won a Screen Actors Guild Award and has also won and been nominated for multiple other awards.
This will be her second Emmy Award nomination as compared to Obama’s first.
Other competitors alongside the two are Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, narrator of Black Patriots: Heroes of the Civil War; previous Emmy winner David Attenborough, narrator of The Mating Game: In Plain Sight; and W. Kamau Bell, the narrator of We Need to Talk About Cosby.
