Tomorrow morning, the Screen Actors Guild will reveal their awards nominees for the year. So far, the potential nominees are a bit all over the place. We used to build charts to compare the Globes with the SAGs and with the Oscars, but since the random sampling of SAG members who do the nominating has expanded to include AFTRA members, it seems silly to measure them in terms of historical precedents. Still, we know a few things.
There is almost always one or two names that get left off the list from SAG to Oscar. In each of the last two years, two of SAG’s Best Actress nominees were left off Oscar’s list. The year before, one did. The critics have, in the past, been known to push a deserving actress into the race that knocks out another name. But they have not really produced one this year.
The same sort of goes for Best Actor, as well the Supporting and Best Cast categories. They all mostly match the Oscar nominees, but there tends to be a little wiggle room, especially given the makeup of SAG-AFTRA now.
I think that we can expect a few surprises, but predicting those surprises is nearly impossible.
For Best Actor, the top four seems likely to be:
Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour
Timothee Chalamet, Call Me By Your Name
Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread
Tom Hanks, The Post
The last slot is between Denzel Washington, Jake Gyllenhaal, and James Franco. Probably.
Best Actress seems like it’s down to:
Frances McDormand, Three Billboards
Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water
Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird
Meryl Streep, The Post
Margot Robbie, I, Tonya
In order for Jessica Chastain to get a nomination, she has to replace one of the above five and right now that seems like it could be hard. On the other hand, SAG generally throws a “WTF” nomination because a lot of the randomly selected voters on the nominating committeee aren’t necessarily following awards season and might not know which actresses are the most buzzed at the moment. There are also Judi Dench, Kate Winslet, Brooklynn Prince, Gal Gadot, Michelle Williams, and Annette Bening — any of them could pop up here.
For Supporting Actor, we have a top three:
Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project
Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards
Armie Hammer, Call Me By Your Name
Then we have any two of the following:
Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water
Jason Mitchell, Mudbound
Michael Stuhlbarg, Call Me By Your Name
Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World
Mark Rylance, Dunkirk
Ben Mendelsohn, Darkest Hour
It’s a hard category to call right now because there is no clear consensus yet.
Similarly, there’s a top two for Supporting Actress:
Alison Janney, I Tonya
Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird
And then we have:
Mary J. Blige, Mudbound
Octavia Spencer, Shape of Water
Holly Hunter, The Big Sick
Hong Chau, Downsizing
Tiffany Haddish, Girls Trip
Melissa Leo, Novitiate
Julia Roberts, Wonder
Finally, we get to Best Cast (or Ensemble), and here we have probably the most difficult category to predict because of the randomly selected people who do the voting. We really just have no clue.
These films feel like a safe bet:
The Post
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
The Shape of Water
Lady Bird
Then it might be:
Get Out
Dunkirk
Mudbound
I, Tonya
The Disaster Artist
Call Me By Your Name
I guess if I had to pick five I’d go with:
The Post
Three Billboards
The Shape of Water
Lady Bird
Mudbound or Get Out … but it’s a tough call.
That makes this a really difficult race to predict. In truth, those top four might not even be safe bets. It’s a really hard category to call because of all the potential variables involved. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow how to wrestle this bear to the ground.
Here is our contest!