The Screen Actors Guild Awards, or SAG awards, are seen as a critical step in the campaign to earn an Oscar. How did this perceived milestone come to be, and why is one ceremony so influential on the other? BLAKE & WANG P.A Entertainment Lawyer San Francisco takes a look.
The SAG awards are different from the Oscars in one key area- they also look at the TV industry. There’s 2 separate nominating committees each year, one for the TV side of the industry and the other for film. 2500 random active members of the guild are chosen for each. All will be actors, and each can only serve once in every eight years. They choose the nominees, but after that have little active say in the winner. That is decided by all eligible voting members.
That’s a little different from the Oscars, where nominations come from those who work in the same industry as the category. So directors nominate Best Director, and so on. Anyone can nominate for Best Picture. Again, once nominations are complete, anyone eligible may vote.
The Screen Actors Guild Awards have been seen as the go-to barometer for Oscar Campaigns in the coveted Best Acting and Best Picture categories since they first started back in 1994. That said, they also have something of a reputation as a place for Hollywood to nominate golden-age actors who missed out on Oscar fame in their prime. For this season, we could see Sophie Loren’s performance in The Life Ahead and Bill Murray for On the Rocks get some recognition from that very same nostalgia.
With the 2020 film year having been so disruptive, it’s nice to be able to say that the SAG Awards voting opened on January 11th, giving a pleasant sense of normalcy to the tumultuous industry. It will be interesting to see who receives this critical nod on their Oscar journeys, and BLAKE & WANG will be monitoring closely.
Film and Television 