Kathy Bates has 10 Emmy nominations since 2000, wins included, and 1 win: Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie in 2014. Over the same 2000–2025 span she has 2 Oscar nominations, wins included. She was left off this year's Emmy acting ballot, which is why her name is the one running the nomination-morning conversation.
Why does one missing name take over nomination morning?
The nominations landed and most of the big shows did the expected thing. The Pitt walked in as the drama to beat with Noah Wyle installed as the man everyone else has to beat. Hacks closed out its run on top of the comedy field. Beef came back in anthology form and took the limited series chatter with it.
Then people scrolled to the acting lists, did not find Kathy Bates, and stopped reading the rest.
That is the real shape of nomination morning. The locks get a nod and the omissions get the group chat. Taylor Sheridan's Paramount corner went home empty. The Bear's men were left off. Richard Gadd's Half Man was kept at a polite distance. But the Matlock season had put Bates at the center of the drama actress conversation, close enough that a lot of people had already written the speech for her, so her absence is the one that stings.
So we went and pulled her record out of our own files, because "she was overdue" is a feeling and we wanted a number. What we found was less dramatic than the group chat and more useful.
What does Kathy Bates's award ledger look like since 2000?
Here is everything our data can say about her, and nothing it can't.
| Ceremony | Span | Nominations (wins included) | Wins |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emmys | 2000–2025 | 10 | 1 (Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie, 2014) |
| Oscars | 2000–2025 | 2 | Our Oscar file counts nominations only |
Ten Emmy nominations since 2000, one Emmy win since 2000. Nine of those ten Emmy nights ended with a seat, a camera cutaway, and somebody else's name being read. That is not a slump. That is what a nomination is.
We should be straight about the edges of the file, too. Our Oscar column counts nominations with wins folded in, 2 of them across 2000–2025, and it does not break out an Oscar win total. Our Emmy history starts in 2000 and knows nothing about 1949 through 1999, so every count on this page is a modern-era count and nothing more. If you came here for a career-spanning tally, we are the wrong desk.
Does "due" actually predict anything?
Every nomination morning produces a due list, and this year it is loud: Martin Short is a longtime nominee being talked about as finally getting his, and the same energy was pointed at Bates a season ago. The problem is that "due" is a story about the past and a ballot is a guess about one night.
Look at the ratio again. Since 2000, Kathy Bates has converted her Emmy nominations into a win once in ten tries. That is one of the most decorated performers in the field, in the exact window our data covers, and the honest read of her Emmy record is that being nominated is the achievement and the win is a coin doing whatever a coin does.
We are not being gloomy about it. We are pointing out that a pool ballot rewards the boring version of that sentence. If your instinct is to reward a career, you are picking against the way the Emmys have actually behaved since 2000, and we have written the longer version of that fight in how often the Emmy favorite actually wins.
The other trap is treating "she was close last time" as a running total. Losing narrowly does not bank credit. Nobody at the ceremony carries forward the near miss, and the ballot you fill in this year is scored on this year.
Is the chalk pick safer now that the field lost its story?
This is the question a snub actually raises. When the name everyone was going to write down disappears, the field looks flatter, and a flat field feels like a free square. It isn't.
21%
#At the Emmys, the defending champ holds the envelope just 21% of the time. Chalk is a lie.
Across 200 Emmy category-years (2000–2025), the previous year's winner repeated 42 times.
That card is Emmy data, 2000–2025, and it is the single most useful number in pool season: the defending champion in a category repeats only about one year in five. So when your most confident friend fills in the incumbent across the board because the disruptive nominee got left off, they are not playing it safe. They are playing the least interesting version of a hard game.
4.6/22
#Copy last year's winners onto all 22 categories and you'd average 4.6 right. Bold picks win pools.
The "just pick the incumbents" ballot lands around 21% of the card. The pool is won in the categories that turn over.
Also Emmy data, also 2000–2025. The all-incumbents ballot scores worse than most people guess, which is the polite way of saying the guacamole ballot gets beaten by anyone who looked at one category twice.
The useful move after a snub is not "pick the returning winner." It is "figure out which kind of category this is." Some Emmy races since 2000 lock up for years, some turn over constantly, and we split them apart in streaks versus turnover. A snub in a turnover category means very little. A snub in a streak category means the streak just got easier to keep going.
How should a snub change your ballot?
Here is the order we would work in, from most to least worth your time.
- Leave the rest of the ballot alone. One acting omission does not move a drama series race or a directing race. It moves one line.
- Reprice the category, not the narrative. Ask who the voters were going to pick if the sentimental option was never there, and then ask whether that person has ever won this specific category.
- Check the category's history before the season's. Streak category or turnover category, per the Emmy data 2000–2025. That answer beats any precursor.
- Spend your uncertainty where the points are. The races that decide a pool are not the ones with the loudest snubs, and we sorted them in the categories that decide your pool.
- Write down the pick you almost made. Then when it wins and you didn't take it, you will at least know exactly which version of yourself to blame.
One more thing, because a skeptical reader is already typing it: yes, a single performer's ratio is a small sample. Ten Emmy nominations since 2000 is ten data points and we are not pretending it is a law. The point is the direction. A decorated career, in the window we can actually see, produced one Emmy win out of ten chances, and there is no line in any of our files where being loved converts to being read out.
Where do you put all of this before showtime?
Take the snub, take the ratio, and go build the thing. Start a pool in about a minute, then let the Emmy ballot generator lay out every category so you can see which lines you actually have an opinion about. The Emmys 2026 hub has the category pages if you want to argue with the field one race at a time, and the Emmy pool guide covers scoring and tiebreaks so nobody relitigates the rules during the limited series block. What your group plays for is between you. We just keep the score honest.
Somewhere in your group there is a person who will spend three hours defending a pick for a performer who was not nominated, and honestly, that is the most Emmy thing that will happen all night.