The SAG awards don’t usually happen after Oscar ballots are already turned in. That’s how the calendar fell this year. What happens at the SAG awards will have zero impact on the Oscars. What happens at the BAFTAs might have minimal impact on the Oscars except in terms of member crossover. The BAFTAs have enormous influence because there are so many members in both groups. That isn’t the case with the SAG awards.
The SAG awards aren’t just for actors anymore. They are now SAG/AFTRA, as of 2012. That means they are actors but they are also AFTRA (television and radio), which is everyone but the kitchen sink.
From Wikipedia: Nominations for the awards come from two committees, one for film and one for television, each numbering 2,100 members of the union, randomly selected anew each year, with the full membership (165,000 as of 2012) available to vote for the winners.
That’s the largest voting body by far in the awards race. That said, humans are funny creatures. We are herd animals as far as I can tell – or tribal, if you prefer. We tend to follow a consensus vote. That’s because most people don’t really know how to do anything else. If everyone is voting for something, they tend to vote for that something too. This particular group is hard to predict.
What we do know is that there has been a major influence of SAG since 2020. Not sure exactly why that is, but it is so. The pattern started in 2019, when Parasite became the “standing ovation” movie and that momentum carried it through to a Best Picture win. Then COVID hit and 2020 was a different scenario and was not nominated for the SAG ensemble. But the following year, with CODA, the same thing happened. The Power of the DOG was winning, then CODA won the PGA and then the SAG. That carried it through to a Best Picture win. The same thing happened with both Everything Everywhere All At Once and Oppenheimer. That’s quite a run for SAG ensemble.
Prior to 2019, the SAG ensemble didn’t cross over as often. Spotlight, four years before, had been the last time.
That brings us to this year. I expect three out of four of the acting wins are locked: Adrien Brody for The Brutalist, Kieran Culkin for A Real Pain and Zoe Saldana for Emilia Perez. That leaves only two categories open for debate. Best Actress and Ensemble.
It would be easy to just say Anora for both. Mikey Madison wins the SAG, and Anora wins the ensemble. But it might not go that way. Wicked could win with such a large consensus. Demi Moore could win because she’s so popular. Madison could win because they like Anora. But there wasn’t enough time between the surprise BAFTA win and the voting deadline for SAG for the momentum to work in Madison’s favor. Probably Demi Moore has it. But that doesn’t mean she’ll win the Oscar.
For SAG ensemble, there seem to be two forces at play with this group. One is social justice/identity (aka “woke”), which will drive winners because they want to do something good with their vote. For instance, the year Parasite won, the Academy continued to be under fire for all white acting nominees that year, or at least the winners would have been all white, even if the nominees were not. But in choosing Parasite, they evaded the bad headlines the next day. Had that winner been The Irishman or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, for instance, they would have had all-white winners? Not to say Parasite wasn’t great, it is. But it was an odd move for an industry with such a strong year for American studio movies to pick the South Korean entry.
The films that won have been Black Panther, CODA, and Hidden Figures. But they also picked The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Oppenheimer. So, there is also a strain that runs through them, and they will still pick movies with lots of actors just for that reason, though it’s uncommon. Emilia Perez was the movie that was perfect for them in every way. It would be the “standing ovation” movie because it had a big cast of mostly people of color and the first transgender nominee.
Could it still win despite the star’s tweet scandal? Maybe. It’s possible. But actors care about their image more than any other group, so I would bet not. But leave that open as a possibility.
I find this one harder to predict because it definitely could go to Anora in a true consensus year. But it could go to Wicked too. That one makes the most sense to me because it ticks off all of the necessary boxes. It honors Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande who aren’t going to win another award. It’s a popular movie and it’s an actors movie (with the caveat that it’s 100K AFTRA voters).
The big actor movie is Conclave. And it could definitely win simply because of the star power involved. Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, etc. It’s a lot of heavy hitters. The same can be said for A Complete Unknown, although they aren’t so much heavy hitters as they are popular actors.
We can try our Rotten Tomatoes audience score to see what happens. I notice that Anora’s score has dropped three points since it won PGA/DGA. That tells me people are actively trying to attack it, or they watched it and they were disappointed in it. This is how the movies are stacking up:
How I see them:
Anora –in a consensus year. (Is it too hard for them to understand?)
Conclave–big actor movie (did it drive passion?)
A Complete Unknown–trendy actor movie (do they know Dylan?)
Emilia Perez–standing ovation movie thwarted
Wicked–seems to most likely
Wicked seems to me to be the strongest of these contenders. It gives them everything they could ever want with a winner — intersectional, diverse, but also entertaining and a hit.
So if Demi Moore Wicked win and Anora is shut out, that will send the pundits scrambling. The only thing to know about this is that Oscar ballots have already been turned in, so it doesn’t matter. That’s probably the most likely scenario. If my heart wasn’t involved, I would predict Demi Moore and Wicked. But since my heart is involved, and the heart wants what it wants, I’ll have to predict this way:
Best Actor: Adrien Brody, The Brutalist (Could be Timothee Chalamet, A Complete Unknown)
Best Actress: Mikey Madison, Anora (probably will be Demi Moore, The Substance)
Best Supporting Actor: Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain
Best Suppoting Actress: Zoe Saldana, Emilia Perez
Ensemble: Anora (probably will be Wicked)
I realize I’m having it both ways but that’s what you get to do if you run your own website. I guess we’ll see how it goes.
What it all means for the Oscar is not known. Even though I predicted Anora for Critics Choice, PGA, and DGA, I am still sort of surprised it won all of those. It won on a preferential ballot and on a non-preferential ballot. So we already know that both La La Land and 1917 did the same thing and then lost the Oscar, but they did not have an SAG ensemble.
Films that won PGA/DGA – were nominated for SAG ensemble but did not win:
2009-The Hurt Locker
2011-The Artist
Are there any films that won PGA/DGA, were nominated for SAG ensemble, but did not win Best Picture?
No, not in the expanded ballot era. There have been films in the past that did, like Apollo 13, which won PGA/DGA and SAG ensemble and still lost Best Picture, but not since 2009 when they expanded the ballot.
Since Anora is nominated for the SAG ensemble and won the PGA/DGA, it’s still on track to win Best Picture, at least according to these stats, with or without BAFTA. What helps Anora is that there isn’t just one oppositional frontrunner. There are many. Because of that, the consensus, at least in the American film industry, has centered around Anora.
Anora might be on track to win Best Picture, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will win the SAG ensemble. It might. But it might not. And it won’t matter either way.
I will be doing a podcast with Clarence Moye and Mark Johnson tomorrow to talk about SAG predictions, and depending on how that goes, I might swap these out. We’ll see what happens this weekend when the SAG awards roll out.
