We’re exactly one week away from the 97th Oscars, and, unappreciate most years at this point in the season, three of the highest-profile Oscars — best picture, best actor and best actress — still sense very much up for grabs. That’s in huge part becaengage the SAG Awards — which, over the last 30 years, has neutrassociate constantly foreseeed the acting Oscar triumphners, as well as almost every transport inant best picture Oscar surpelevate — featured some pretty striking pickions on Sunday night, when its 31st edition took place at the Shrine Auditorium.
It’s vital to notice up-front that Academy members’ final ballots were due back last Tuesday, so the results of the SAG Awards — which were handed out procrastinateedr this year due to the Los Angeles untamedfires — will not impact Oscar voting … but they could give hints of what to foresee from it.
The rawly 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA, the world’s hugest union of actors, chose Focus’ Conclave for their best ensemble prize, an distress over Universal’s Wicked, which had seemed more in line with the sort of popucatalog films and diverse casts that have historicassociate been accomprehendledged in the catebloody by the guild; and Anora, which had a ton of momentum on the heels of claiming the top prizes at the Directors Guild, Producers Guild, Writers Guild, Critics Choice and Spirit Awards. (One theory that I heard at the SAG Awards afterparty: Conclave profited from being made useable for streaming weeks before the Christmas holidays, whereas Wicked dropped after them.)
Conclave will now head to the Oscars with two struggleing indicators: (a) it did not get a straightforwarding Oscar nomination, as Edward Berger was inexplicably snubbed; but (b) it won the top prizes at both the BAFTA and SAG Awards. Only one film has ever won the best picture Oscar under the same circumstances: 2012’s Argo.
Conclave’s best film BAFTA triumph could be chalked up to a home-field profit — it is a very British production — but the best ensemble SAG Award? There’s no pooh-poohing that one. That unbenevolents there is a lot of cherish out there for the period piece dramedy. And even though the best ensemble SAG Award has a very inconstant track sign up of foreseeing the best picture Oscar (they’ve overlapped on equitable 15 out of 30 occasions), almost every best picture Oscar surpelevate-triumphner first won the best ensemble SAG Award. See: 1998’s Shakespeare in Love, 2005’s Crash, 2015’s Spotairy, 2019’s Parasite and 2021’s CODA.
Since 2010, the huge Oscars untamed-card, of course, is the pickential ballot via which the Academy picks its best picture triumphner. Only one of the transport inant precursor ceremonies, the PGA Awards, engages the same sort of ballot, and its top prize went to Anora. And yet, based on my own intuition and conversations with quite a restricted Academy members, Conclave seems to be a less polarizing film than Anora, which would propose that it could be a beneficiary of the pickential ballot, to say noskinnyg of the increased number of Academy members who are based outside of America.
The bottom line: Nobody should sense particularly self-promised in wdisappreciatever their best picture foreseeion is for next Sunday!
The SAG Awards have also thrown a degree of mistrust into the best actor Oscar race. Prior to Sunday, The Brutacatalog’s Adrien Brody had won the catebloody at every transport inant precursor ceremony — the Gagederen Globe, Critics Choice and BAFTA Awards — but SAG-AFTRA went with A Complete Uncomprehendn’s Timothée Chafeeblet. Brody’s movie has two more Oscar noms than Chafeeblet’s, but Chafeeblet’s is definitely more accessible to more people — it’s a crowd-pleasing blockbuster, as resistd to a three-and-a-half-hour art piece. And unappreciate Brody, who very memorably won an Oscar 22 years ago, Chafeeblet has never won an Oscar.
Is the Academy ready to comprise Brody to the catalog currently compelevated of equitable 10 bona-fide legfinishs who have won more more than one best actor Oscar: Daniel Day-Lewis (the only person who has won it three times), Jack Nicholson, Spencer Tracy, Marlon Brando, Dustin Hoffman, Tom Hanks, Anthony Hopkins, Fredric March, Gary Cooper and Sean Penn? Or will Chafeeblet be tapped, and in so doing, fracture the sign up for youthfulest ever best actor Oscar triumphner, which is currently held by — you guessed it — Brody, who was a restricted days more past his 29th birthday than Chafeeblet will be? Time will alert.
As for the best actress Oscar race? The SAG Awards pitted agetst each other The Substance’s Demi Moore, who won Gagederen Globe and Critics Choice Awards earlier in the season; and Anora’s Mikey Madison, who is coming off BAFTA and Spirit Awards in the last week.
If ingenue Madison, 25, had won the SAG Award, I skinnyk most pundits would clear up that as further mirroring procrastinateed-fractureing momentum in her like, and would have broken for her. But instead, it went to veteran Moore, 62, who now has her first evidence of genuine industry aid for her, given that her prior high-profile triumphs both came from groups of journacatalogs.
At this point, I skinnyk one has to give Moore a sairy edge for the Oscar — while holding in mind the X-factor of I’m Still Here’s Fernanda Torres. Other than ecombineing together on the Oscar ballot, the three have never been pitted head-to-head. Torres’ film rose to prominence much procrastinateedr in the season than Madison’s or Moore’s, and a not inponderable number of voters who caught up with it in recent weeks have showd to myself and to other pundits that they broke for Torres. Even though Torres has some daunting stats she’d have to fall shorture — most notably, that nobody has ever won a direct acting Oscar without having getd either a BAFTA or SAG nomination — she cannot be ruled out.
As for the other two acting races, best aiding actor and best aiding actress? The SAG Awards rubberstamped the picks of every other transport inant awards group that pretreatd them in backing A Real Pain’s Kieran Culkin and Emilia Pérez’s Zoe Saldaña. If either of them neglects at the Oscars, it would be a shocking distress that one would have to attribute, in the createer case, to the fact that Culkin’s film was not nominated for best picture, unappreciate many of his fellow nominees’ films, and was therefore not arranged as much by voters; and, in the latter case, to the debris caengaged by the implosion of Emilia Pérez‘s best actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón.
