The 30th Screen Actors Guild Awards: Six Key Takeaways
Tonight, the 30th Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards honored the best in film and television acting over the past year. Here, I recap the show and reflect on what the winners mean (and don’t mean) for the upcoming Oscars and Emmys.
What Are the SAG Awards and Why Are They Important?
The SAG Awards are comprised of 15 competitive categories that honor to individual actors and acting ensembles across film and television. The nominations are determined by a subset of the membership of SAG-AFTRA, a labor union that represents approximately 160,000 film, television, and radio performers. The full membership then votes for the winners. The SAG Awards telecast is a star-studded affair by its very nature and the SAG winners have presaged numerous major Oscar upsets (e.g., Shakespeare in Love’s Best Picture win over Saving Private Ryan, Crash’s win over Brokeback Mountain, Spotlight’s win over The Revenant, Parasite’s win over 1917). Largely as a result of these two factors, the SAG Awards have evolved into a highly esteemed awards ceremony over the past 3 decades.
SAG’s television winners have a fairly weak convergence with the eventual winner of the Primetime Emmys (the top award for television). There are several reasons for this, including the massively different…
