Cornellians win big at Emmy Awards

Four Cornellians, including "Glee" star Jane Lynch, M.F.A. '84, were among the winners at the 2010 Emmy Awards, held Aug. 21 and 29 in Los Angeles.

Lynch, who studied theater at Cornell, won the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress for her role as cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester on the Fox series. "Glee" led the night at the Primetime Emmys Aug. 29 with 19 nominations and won two Emmys.

"You're fresh-faced, and when I'm not seething with jealousy, I'm so proud of you," Lynch said of her younger fellow cast members during her acceptance speech.

Brent "Bucky" Gunts '72, director of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games Opening Ceremony for NBC, won his fourth Primetime Emmy, for Outstanding Directing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Special. Gunts earned a degree in economics from the College of Arts and Sciences; he also played lacrosse for Cornell from 1970 to 1972 and helped the Big Red win an NCAA championship.

Scott Ferguson '82 produced two multiple-Emmy-winning HBO films. Ferguson collected a statue Aug. 29 for "Temple Grandin," which won five awards, including Outstanding Made for Television Movie, for the story of the woman who overcame autism to fight for humane animal treatment. Grandin, who attended the ceremony, was a recent Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of '56 Professor at Cornell. Ferguson's other HBO project, "You Don't Know Jack," about Dr. Jack Kevorkian, won Emmys for actor Al Pacino and writer Alan Mazer.

Also, as previously reported, Marco Recuay '03 received his first Emmy Award for Visual Effects in a Miniseries or Movie, for his work on HBO's "The Pacific" at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards ceremony held Aug. 21. The 10-part series about World War II also won an Emmy for Outstanding Miniseries at the Primetime Emmys.

"Our company [Digital Dreams] worked on seven of the 10 episodes; we did about 600 shots over a period of two years," said Recuay, who has supervised visual effects on more than 10 feature films including "Spider-Man 3." His next projects include effects work on films starring Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis, he said.

Recuay earned a B.A. in film and said of his Cornell education: "It's proven useful in ways that I didn't expect. The way the arts curriculum and the film curriculum works, you can take classes in a lot of areas of study -- courses like psychology and history, classes that really helped me end up doing my job better. A lot of the technical classes weren't really the key as were psychology and art history. It gives you a broader depth of knowledge than the technical schools do."

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Blaine Friedlander