Adam Sandler eliminated Tom Cruise, Ana de Armas and Eddie Redmayne while “The Fabelmans” stars Michelle Williams and Judd Hirsh did not and “Babylon” and “Women Talking” were nominated for best cast of the year despite that no film received an award. individual solo performance nomination.
Such were the quirks of the 29 annual Screen Actors Guild Awards nominations, which were announced Wednesday morning in a ramshackle Instagram Live performance by Ashley Park and Haley Lu Richardson.
In most cases, the more than 2,000 randomly selected SAG members who made up the film and television nominating committees picked up the favorites: Austin Butler, Colin Farrell, Brendan Fraser, Cate Blanchett and Michelle Yeoh in the categories. leads, Brendan Gleeson, Ke Huy Quan, Angela Bassett, Kerry Condon, Jamie Lee Curtis and Stephanie Hsu in support and “Babylon”, “The Banshees of Inisherin”, Everything Everywhere All at Once”, “The Fabelmans” and “Women Talking ” in the ensemble category.
If there were any surprises in the movie categories, it was that a pair of Netflix stars, Sandler and de Armas, crashed in the top five. Sandler went up against Cruise and the juggernaut from “Top Gun: Maverick” (although that was hardly considered an acting movie), while de Armas gave a well-received performance as Marilyn Monroe in a movie, “Blonde,” that was highly regarded. criticized. .
Then again, so was “Babylon,” which now has the looks of a real awards contender after its nomination as an ensemble, despite its negative reviews.
SAG is the first of Hollywood’s four major guilds to weigh in with their film nominations, with the Directors Guild no later than Wednesday, the Producers Guild Thursday, January 12, and the Writers Guild announcing January 25. , marks the pivotal moment where we stop hearing about the critics’ picks for the best of the year and start learning about the favorites of movie professionals who will eventually make their Oscar picks.
Still, SAG voters aren’t always a reliable indicator of subsequent awards success, even though around 80% of its nominees typically receive Oscar nominations. Last year, SAG and the Oscars matched exactly only in the Best Actor category, with the other three individual acting categories differing significantly. In both supporting categories, only two SAG Award nominees received Oscar nominations, while in Best Actress only three did.
(On the other hand, all four SAG winners—Will Smith, Jessica Chastain, Troy Kotsur, and Ariana DeBose—repeated at the Oscars.)
And while every Best Picture winner between 1996 and 2016 had previously been nominated in the SAG ensemble category, in the past five years only two Oscar winners have been nominated for SAG. “The Shape of Water,” “Green Book” and “Nomadland” all won the top Academy Award without receiving the overall nomination that for 21 years seemed a virtual prerequisite for Oscar success.
Then there was last year’s winner “CODA,” who scored his upset Oscar victory after winning the SAG ensemble for the first time, the latest of several times in which the SAG winner provided valuable advice on the SAG winner. Oscar. (Previous examples had included “Shakespeare in Love,” “Crash,” and “Parasite.”)
In other words: SAG could have given us a couple of valuable clues about the rest of awards season, or it could have misled us. It’s time for the other guilds to turn this initial snapshot into a more complete picture.
