‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,’ ‘Lower Decks’ And ‘Discovery’ Pick Up 6 Saturn Awards Nominations

Today the nominations for the 50th-anniversary edition of the Saturn Awards were announced, and Star Trek Universe shows brought in a total of six nominations. The annual awards event from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films honors the best in genre film and television, and this year three Star Trek shows are up for awards.

Strange New Worlds leads the way

The freshman season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds picked up a total of four nominations, including Best Streaming Science Fiction Series where it is going head-to-head with Star Trek: Discovery, which has picked up Best Series Saturn Awards for all three of its previous seasons. The two Trek series are going up against The Expanse, For All Mankind, Lost in Space, The Mandalorian, and The Orville: New Horizons.

From season four of Star Trek: Discovery

Strange New Worlds also picked up three acting nominations, starting off with star Anson Mount (Captain Pike) for Best Actor in a Streaming Series. Mount is going up against Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Oscar Isaac (Moon Knight), Anthony Mackie (Falcon & The Winter Soldier), Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi), Adam Scott (Severance), and Antony Starr (The Boys).

Anson Mount in Strange New Worlds

Ethan Peck (Spock) and Jess Bush (Christine Chapel) were also nominated for their Strange New Worlds roles. Peck’s Best Supporting Actor in a Streaming Series competition is Zach Cherry (Severance), Ethan Hawke (Moon Knight), Joel Kinnaman (For All Mankind) Elliot Page (Umbrella Academy), Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things), and John Turturro (Severance). Bush’s Best Supporting Actress in a Streaming Series competition is Patricia Arquette (Severance), Danielle Brooks (Peacemaker), Nell Tiger (Free Servant), Kathryn Hahn (WandaVision), Moses Ingram (Obi-Wan Kenobi), and Aleyse Shannon (Leverage: Redemption).

Jess Bush and Ethan Peck in Strange New Worlds

And finally Star Trek: Lower Decks was nominated for Best Animated Series, going up against Arcane, Blade Runner: Black Lotus, The Boys Presents: Diabolical, Invincible, Star Wars: The Bad Batch, and What If? This is the first time Lower Decks has been nominated for a Saturn Award.

From season two of Lower Decks

A full list of nominations are available at Deadline. The awards ceremony will be held on October 25th and it will be livestreamed on ElectricNOW.


Find more news and analysis on Star Trek Universe TV shows at TrekMovie.com.

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Congrats to all 3 Trek shows for their nominations.
I hope Lower Decks wins the best animated series as S2 was fantastic.

I hope the cast of SNW wins their awards too but i am disappointed that Patrick Stewart and Sonequa Martin Green didn’t get nominated as i thought their acting was some of the best i have seen in Trek and both deserve recognition imo.

SNW S1 was great but i do hope Discovery wins the award for best sci-fi show as i personally found S4 to be the better written show and one of the best seasons of Trek and some of the best writing since DS9.

Still even if SNW wins the award it’s a good thing for the franchise as a whole. Each of the current shows whenever they have aired have always been the number 1 show watched at that time according to Paramount.

Which goes to show that despite some who hate on some of the current shows are in a minority and that the majority of the Trekkie fandom have accepted and enjoy each of the current shows.

It truly is a good time to be a Trekkie and we should consider ourselves lucky to have Trek shows that cater to different styles and tastes.

Arcane is going to mop the floor with Lower Decks, and it won’t be close. Arcane shows just how great an animated sf series can be.

It’s always a mistake to predict award wins.

That’s what the predictors who get it wrong say.

Never heard of Arcane but of course I’m REALLY pulling for Lower Decks to win! I really love the show.

Even if it doesn’t, it’s still pretty cool it even got nominated. Before the show started, I never imagined it would be on this level at all and it’s nice to see it being recognized at least and so early in its run and imagine it won’t be the last!

Wow congrats to all the shows!

As a person of color, One of the issue I have with strange new worlds is how the creators purposely wrote and reinvented christine chapel that she is outshining all the other female characters including such an iconic character like Uhura.

Chapel Jess Bush is not even the best actress on the show, that goes to the actress who plays T-Pring and Celia Gooding, who though has no resemblance to Nichelle Nichols is doing a good enough job that it does not matter much, but Chapel been propped as the pretty hot blonde, who has no deeper purpose on the show but to try and steal Spock from T-Pring, is enough for her to outshine all the other girls whose stories seem to have more meat.

The fact that Bush was nominated and not the actress who played Tpring even in guest performance when she gave the single best performance for a female playing Spock in Spock amok just show how much the SNW writers and the media are trying their best to make Jess Bush the break out star of the show.

Uhura was such a ground breaking character as proven with nichelle nichols passing and all the tribute, Celia Gooding is good in the role but is not getting the same attention as Jess Bush.

if you have told me that 60 years later a soft reboot of trek will exist like SNW where Chapel will outshine Uhura in everyway possible. I would have laughed but here we are, this is the reality and what makes it jaring is that this SNW Chapel has been given a lot of TOS and AOS Uhura traits and personality. Jess Bush Chapel has nothing in common in TOS. She has more in common with TOS and JJ Trek Uhura.

I feel bad for many women of color who have to sit through this and watch the pretty blonde girl keep getting all the attention, I hope they start raising this concerns to the SNW writers.

I get your concern, but respectfully, I also think that if you are going to base this all one woman of color female character’s screen time on a current Star Trek series, then you need to look at all four Trek shows “on the air” right now and then please tell me if you still think this is an issue?

I’m surprised that Jess Bush got a nomination too. To be honest I don’t think any of the actresses on SNW really deserve a nomination for any of the acting they did in season one. Not to say that any of them were bad, quite the contrary; I really enjoy all of them. But I just don’t think any of them had any real big moments to shine and that’s down to the limitations of their character arc’s/writing.
At a push I’d say Christina Chong as La’an probably had the most to show in terms of emotional range throughout the season; from acting stern, cold and aloof whilst performing her duties, to moments of trauma and grief with Spock remembering the Gorn attack, to the silliness’s of the fantasy episode where she got to be a royal airhead. I’d agree about Celia too, she had a lot of opportunities to really shine this season and did a great job of putting her own spin on Uhura. And Gia Sandhu who did indeed somehow bring so much charisma to a character as emotionally limiting like T’Pring. But still, I just wasn’t wowed by any of it. Again, not the performers fault, I’m sure with better material they could really knock it out of the park.

I will say though, from what I know about these award shows, is that the network usually put everyone possible forward for a “for your consideration” nomination, the more performances they enter the more chance of someone getting picked and thus more publicity if any of them get chosen. I remember HBO put for your consideration packages together for every single actor who appeared in the final season of Game of Thrones for all the major award shows, which seemed so excessive to me but it lodged in my brain.
So you can bet that Celia, Rebecca Romain…everyone on the main cast was put forward by Paramount. The reasoning is that any nomination is a great win for the show, they can use it to create attention for the show, create column space and online articles with the good news all the while advertising the show through the nominations and “buzz” of all that.
And from what I know they can only put someone forward for their work in one particular episode, not the whole season.
And after that it’s up to the Saturn awards judging panel to choose the nominees and then release the list. So I wouldn’t say that this is a sinister case of Paramount choosing the white actor, I think it’s more a case of the Saturn Awards going with what they thought was the best performance from the clips of whatever episode Paramount decided to put up for her for consideration.

I agree that Chong I thought would be the best actress for S1 on SNW, although all the female actors did a very solid to great level of acting in my opinion.

I wish I could accept Vackie’s comment as legitimate criticism of the show creators, but I can’t. This is a clear attack on Bush for being white and being “the pretty blonde girl… getting all the attention.”

Nobody was “propped up” by the producers in a racially discriminatory way. Bush is white and has blonde hair. She’s talented. She’s part of a diverse cast. This is not a problem.

It would be just fine to say, “I think Celia Rose Gooding was more deserving of an award nomination for her acting.” That would be a reasonable opinion stated in a respectful way. But the way this is phrased, it’s very hard for me not to read this as a racist attack, or at the very least some personal jealousy or other emotional issues expressed in a spiteful way.

If there was a pattern or history of bigotry or discrimination by Henry Alonso Myers et al, that would be one thing. But I don’t see it. We’re talking about the modern Trek universe in which women of color are given the spotlight and winning awards (Sonequa Martin-Green for one.) I can’t see what else—other than a strong dislike for a white woman doing an excellent job and being noticed for it—could be behind such vitriol.

I hope the admins of this site take a closer look at what was said and decide to take action. No one (not even an actor) should be attacked for their skin color or physical appearance. I don’t want to come to trekmovie.com and see comments where people are put down because of their skin color, hair color, or appearance. Anybody remember IDIC? Of all the websites, this isn’t the place.

I hear what you are saying, but I wouldn’t agree that the mods needs to discipline this person — a person who I think has a misguided opinion, but who’s heart is in the right place one would think.

Personally, I just find this person’s comment kind of sad and hope that they can enjoy the incredibly diverse Star Trek shows we have now, and which include women of color in the lead roles on two out of the four series.

I will add that if you go through life wearing race and gender glasses, then you are condemning yourself to think in those terms regarding everything you see — and while in some cases that will be warranted, in many cases it’s not.

With all due respect. lords know I have no plans to attack anyone and i love all people as long as they are good. I wish you had broken down my criticism more from my own point of view giving it as a person of color. I have seen SNW and I noticed that there is no level plain field among the girls. All I want is a level plain field for all people.

I cannot help but notice that in SNW just focusing on Uhura and Chapel for example as they are original characters. Uhura seems to have been watered down in ever way. whereas Chapel seems to have been improved to the point that she is even now breaking TOS Canon. TOS made it clear that Spock had never been close to anyone but Kirk and Chapel is not meant to know Tpring.so why is SNW making Chapel go against all these things.

My other criticism is that why could the show just not keep uhura as she was but still improve on chapel too. why did they have to downgrade uhura the way they did that she does not even bear any resemblance to nichelle nichols and is treated as a child like wesley crusher on the show.

The reality is that SNW has presented chapel to be the most appealing, desirable and popular female on the show. why could we not have all women get the same treatment on the show especially a show with uhura, a black female character who already achieved this status both in TOS and AOS Star Trek. why did they not keep that in SNW.

Also I agree about Laan. She does have more emotional range than Chapel and Ortega at least.

So please never mistake a person of color asking of a level plain field as an attack on white people it is not.

With Uhura, they should have at least cast someone who looked much closer to Nichelle Nichols and who is a lot older compared to Celia Gooding that is just age 22. But may be they did not go for this route because if they have done so, Uhura will be too much of a threat to Chapel and will make the spock and chapel tease romance in SNW less believable, so the creators of SNW felt like they had no choice but to downplay Uhura, the only issue is that, there was no need to.

Don’t down either girls, put them on an even plain field in every way and let the viewers make up their mind.

With Uhura, they should have at least cast someone who looked much closer to Nichelle Nichols and who is a lot older compared to Celia Gooding that is just age 22

But Uhura in SNW is a Starfleet Academy cadet, which means she should be 18 to 21 years old if she is a typical cadet (and we’ve never once seen anything to suggest otherwise). And I don’t think that Anson Mount much resembles Jeffrey Hunter, or that Jess Bush much resembles Majel Barrett, either. Why the special treatment for Gooding?

Not to utterly derail this, but the locks on the actress playing Chapel hardly reflect anything indicating a genuine blonde, more like a Blondie-era Debbie Harry, which was all about a created manufactured look, hardly in keeping with Trek’s advanced folk being comfortable in their own skin (and presumably their own follicles.)

But the original Chapel in TOS always had those huge “birds nest” hairdos, in addition to dying her hair blond (in TMP we finally see her natural hair color — later in her career as a doctor).

So it seems that they are keeping Chapel in character by having unique hairdos, and if anything, her hair is slightly less flamboyant than for TOS Chapel.

Actually we see her natural color or something very close to it before TMP, in TURNABOUT INTRUDER. I was just making the point that for a future where appearance and identity and ego shouldn’t be as much of a factor with people as they are now, that the new Chapel’s look doesn’t reflect that. My wife and I think whoever is making the hairdressing calls on SNW is just playing off the board, and that’s just based primarily on Pike’s Gumby cum Chris Walken look, though I think the Chapel look is almost as distracting.

Yeah that’s such an odd thing to be upset about when the point of her age is that she is a cadet starting out in her Starfleet career. That’s the point, she is suppose to be young in this period. As for her not looking more like Uhura, as you said, none of other the actors look much like the legacy characters they are portraying. Ethan Peck probably look the closest playing Spock but no one is going to mistake him for Leonard Nimoy on the street. The actor playing new Kirk looks closer to Jim Carrey than he does Shatner.

And frankly, once again, outside of Ethan Peck, none of the actors are playing close to the portrayals of the original actors. Mount, Bush, Wesley and yes Good could all be playing different characters entirely. Vague inferences here and there but none is an imitation of the TOS actors or should be.

Also with Uhura, Zoe Saldana also looked absolutely nothing like Nichelle Nichols either. She is black and pretty but that’s basically the extent of it and no one ever seemed bothered by it.

The criticisms (not here) I have seen about Celia Good is that she’s not as pretty, many hate the short hair and some even describes her as too chubby. These are all eye rolling criticisms to me, but welcome to the internet. But I will also stress these complaints do seem to be in the minority. From what I can tell, the overwhelming majority of fans, at least online, really does like the actress and doesn’t have any issues with how she looks or that she doesn’t look closer to Nichols.

Oops, I meant Gooding not Good lol. Good is actually part of my family’s name so I always write it out of habit.

I agree with all of your comments here.

PS: Is your grandad the famous, Johnny B. Good? (-;

Yeah, not quite! ;)

The SNW actors have been fabulous, and I hope they win in their categories!

I hope SNW wins all the awards it is nominated for. They certainly deserve them.

Congrats to all Star Trek shows on their nominations.

I love SNW and like DSC, though I think it is time to bring it to an end. Lower Decks isn’t my thing, but well done to them all.

Saturns have no credibility for me at all. How can DSC win (or even get nominated) as best anything, especially given that it has had actual competition in THE EXPANSE, FOR ALL MANKIND and THE MANDALORIAN? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised; I mean, I stopped taking the Hugo Awards seriously when they gave best dramatic presentation to BACK TO THE FUTURE over BRAZIL and other unnominated fare that was far superior to that sitcom-looking overrated feature that I’d have walked out on if I hadn’t been an auto passenger at a drive-i.

The Mandolorian was an absolute snooze fest. And so was For All Mankind.

To be honest, that’s how I felt about Discovery season 4 by the end. I thought Mandalorian was really fun in the second season, much more than DIS was IMO. Never seen For All Mankind.

Nothing happened in Mandolorian… It was LOTS of filler. Same thing with The Book of Boba Fett. There was barely a story there. I am sure if they cut out all the loooooong draggy screnes, they would have ended up with an hour and a half TV movie. Both those shows were a complete waste of time. And I was incredibly disappointed with the Kenobi series. I would take Discovery any day over those 3 disappointing shows.

But what do you mean nothing happened?? It brought back Luke Skywalker, Ashoka Tano and Boba Fett for starters. It set up the Mandalorian’s fight to reclaim Mandalore and the beginning of that story line that started in TCW. And it revealed the remnants of the Empire story line of trying to clone Jedis. It also tied up Grogu’s arc but yeah that was kind of undone later lol. It wasn’t perfect, but I thought there was tons of fun stuff happening but it’s OK to agree to disagree of course.

I actually agree with you about Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi. I thought those did drag but I liked them too overall. As far as Discovery, it could’ve told its story in half the episodes last season and you lose nothing. That was the main issue for me.

LOL I just dropped an entire litany of spoilers. I should’ve at least marked it as so. But since the show ended over a year and a half ago already and if anyone haven’t watched it yet, chances are they don’t watch the show anyway. But still, I should’ve made it clear it was spoilers.

For me, all it did was give some fan service with bringing back the characters. I felt the story was okay… but the episodes dragged. Very dull. Very monotone. Basically, just MEH for me. But I have no problem with people that enjoyed it, I just found all the recent Star Wars shows to be very lackluster and boring. But that is just my opinion. And you are definitely entitled to your. Different tastes.

OK, fair enough!

Sadly, few awards shows have credibility. The bullcrap that goes on behind the scenes is nauseating. Those of us in the industry tend to have little respect for the Oscars, the Emmies, or other awards. The problem is that the studio expects actors, writers, directors and so forth to show excitement about them, even though they’re largely meaningless since the criteria for choosing the winners are based on back-room favors, money and politics, not merit. So you’ll rarely hear entertainers say what they really think of such awards. I’ve worked backstage at a couple ceremonies, and several times I’ve seen winners cry their eyes out on stage as though they’re emotional and grateful and it’s the greatest thing that has ever happened to them… only to walk back stage, roll their eyes at what they had to just do, and look disdainfully at the awards. One time, an actor walked backstage with trophy in hand and joked “This will look great in my attic boxes.” We all chuckled, knowing that was a common sentiment (many writers, actors, editors, etc., don’t even display them in their homes unless they’re on camera for an interview). The show’s director went apoplectic, because he thought the microphones had picked it up. Thankfully, the TV audience didn’t hear it, but there were some stern words spoken since a network exec was in earshot.

Because Disco has been a great show.

I’ve been enjoying SNW but it feels like they’re focusing more on asking “who can we bring back next?” than “what’s going on in the world that we can write a good story about?” More actual strange new worlds – thought-provoking, distorted reflections of our own – would be good. They’ve doing it in a couple of episodes. Let’s see more!

Imagine the comment section if Discovery managed to beat SNW, Orville, Mandalorian, AND The Expanse.