SAG Awards Preview and Predictions

Tomorrow morning at 7 a.m., the nominations for the SAG awards will be announced live on Instagram. We will do our best to collect those nominations and get them to you as quickly as possible. You can always sign up to our mailing list and have them emailed directly to you when they arrive.

The Screen Actors Guild is obviously very important to the acting categories, especially Best Actress and Actor. They don’t always align 100% with the Oscars, but they’re fairly close. You want your winner to appear with at least a nomination. It’s still possible to win the Oscar without one, but it’s rare.

Remember, though, we’re used to big showy awards with people getting up on stage and being greeted by a large crowd. The moment the entire house stood up for the cast of Parasite was quite a thing to behold. We don’t know whether or not we will have a big show this year. We assume so. Either way, as with the Globes, momentum is often built on whether or not people can be seen on stage, accepting an award. That is often how it’s decided whether or not they should win the Oscar. Sometimes that’s a “yes.” Sometimes it’s a “no.”

The nominating committee is a random sampling of roughly 2,000 people. We don’t know who they are or where they live. That can sometimes lead to wild card nominations. We’re not always 100% on target with our predictions because of that. Now that SAG is SAG-AFTRA, things have shifted a bit. Here is how they put it on their site:

Q: How are the winners of the SAG Awards® determined?
Voting for the SAG Awards is done in two stages. The first, nominations balloting, is voted on by two nominating committees – one for Motion Pictures and one for Television – each comprised of 2,500 randomly selected members. These nominating committees are newly selected each year from our database of paid-up and active SAG-AFTRA members who have not served previously in the past 8 years.

The second stage of voting, final balloting, begins after nominations are announced and is open to all paid-up and active SAG-AFTRA members.

Q: Who is eligible to vote and receive For Your Consideration materials in the final balloting phase of the SAG Awards?
All SAG-AFTRA members in good-standing who have paid their November dues by the designated dues deadline are able to vote on the SAG Awards.

That means that the nominating committees since the merger (2012 or thereabouts) are not just film people — they’re also, potentially, any AFTRA member, so TV/radio personalities and the like. I know: the horror, the horror. But it’s worth knowing that because actors as a group are slightly easier to predict, at least for me. I know the world of actors much better than I know the world of AFTRA

But in a year like this one, with no actual buzz, no parties, and no publicity events, we just have either personal sentiment, behind-the-scenes publicity, and — wait for it — Film Twitter. It’s hard to get a read on anything

We have posted our predictions below. I am hoping against hope that the SAG-AFTRA revives Jennifer Hudson. I am taking a long-shot bet on that, but I don’t really expect it to pan out. On the off-chance it does, though, I want to be there to catch it.

I also have not predicted Don’t Look Up for ensemble, which seems crazy to me. Of course, it will likely get in. We don’t know whether or not they really like Being the Ricardos or they really liked Don’t Look Up or they liked something else entirely. It could honestly go either way, depending on which 2,000 members the committee lands on.

Come to that, House of Gucci could also get in for ensemble, but none of us are predicting it. I will post a No Guts, No Glory later today but that will be mine: House of Gucci.

Either way, after the SAG nominations, I will post a stats-heavy chart that Marshall Flores and I have compiled to show you the history. I think it is too top-heavy to post here.

At any rate, here are our predictions. Make of them what you will. Please post yours in the comments.