Oscar Squad Returns and SAG Shakes Things Up

Welcome to the first Oscar Squad of 2022!

Last week, the Screen Actors Guild threw us a few curveballs, dramatically shifting the Oscar Squad in several ways. Most obviously, despite its absence from the SAG Ensemble race, Netflix’s The Power of the Dog entered 2022 riding a huge wave of critics’ groups awards and finally overtook Belfast as the collective squad’s pick for the eventual Best Picture winner. Granted, it’s an INCREDIBLY close race with Belfast missing the top slot by only one point. But what’s most interesting about the Squad’s repositioning is that perhaps the infamous SAG stat — a film cannot win Best Picture without at least being nominated for SAG Ensemble — may finally be dead. After all, over the last five years, only Parasite and Moonlight were nominated for the SAG Ensemble award.

Perhaps Power getting three SAG performance nominations ahead of Belfast’s single performance nod held more sway with the Squad.

In the director race, Drive My Car’s Ryusuke Hamaguchi debuted just outside of the top five. Many squad members spot him as taking the traditional international film director slot that the Academy tends to include within their top five. Otherwise, things there remain mostly unchanged.

SAG’s biggest impact, however, has to be within the Best Actress race as Kristen Stewart missed out on a nomination, and the Oscar Squad took notice. In all of SAG history, no actress went on to win the Oscar without first receiving a SAG Lead Actress nomination. Now, before you say Kate Winslet, she was SAG nominated the year she won the Oscar, twice in fact. However, she received a SAG nomination in Lead Actress for Revolutionary Road. She won Supporting Actress at SAG for the role that would eventually give her the Lead Actress Oscar: The Reader.

Given that stat, Nicole Kidman, fresh off a surprise Golden Globe win, takes the number one slot. SAG nominee Jennifer Hudson returns to the Oscar Squad list with a handful of members predicting an Oscar nod after a show of strength at SAG.

Take a look at the charts for other changes following the SAG nominations. Meanwhile, we’re all anxiously anticipating January 27 when an unprecedented number of guilds weigh in with their nominations all on the same day.