SAG Winners

The SAG Awards added their say to the season last night, as I'm sure you saw.
I didn't so much watch the show as listen to it from the discomfort of my bathroom, while an underdone chicken & rice dish from Korean Grill House pulled a U-turn in my digestive tract.

Most of the guild's decisions require little commentary, more or less confirming front-runner status for Mahershala Ali, Viola Davis and Emma Stone.

It wasn't until the final two film categories of the night we got some fat to chew. While I wouldn't have called the wins for Denzel Washington and the cast of Hidden Figures full shockers, they do add enough of a wrinkle to keep things interesting, or at least raise some questions:

My Award Nominations: Acting Ensemble

The Screen Actors Guild Awards are this weekend, and all eyes will be on the group's coveted Best Ensemble prize, as this is the biggest chance for Moonlight or Manchester (or possibly something else?) to gain momentum on La La Land, which of course is not up for this significant precursor. In light of that, I hereby announce my own preferences for the best acting rosters of 2016:

SAG Nominees

The Screen Actors Guild is the first industry group out of the gate. As usual, their lists are heavy on Oscar favourites, but the nominating committee is small and random enough to throw in a surprise or two (Welcome to the Oscar race, Emily Blunt and Captain Fantastic?).

Conspicuously missing from their coveted Best Ensemble category is presumed Best Picture frontrunner La La Land. No film has won the Academy's top honour without a SAG Ensemble nod since Braveheart in the SAG Awards' inaugural year. Worth keeping an eye on.

Anyway, here are the nominees their six movie categories:

BEST ENSEMBLE
Captain Fantastic
Fences
Hidden Figures
Manchester by the Sea
Moonlight
Captain Fantastic's inclusion hearkens back to the days when we would regularly get left field inclusions (like Bobby and The Station Agent) with no chance at Best Picture recognition. Now the real question: Does this actually sink La La Land's Best Picture aspirations, or it simply seen as a duet as opposed to an ensemble achievement?

My Award Nominations: Acting Ensemble

I've sounded off on my favourite individual performances, so we'll cap the weekend off with the Ensembles that most impressed me in 2015. Happy Superbowl Sunday!

SAG nominations scattered amongst the pretenders

The first big guild announcement of the season dropped this morning, but when all is said and done, it may not have been such an impactful announcement.

SAG's attention was splintered all over the place, and seems especially out of sync with pundit logic this season. Aggressively campaigned films like Trumbo and The Big Short performed well, but could both conceivably be shut out the Oscars. Some categories could even have as little as an 0/5 overlap with the eventual Oscar slate (especially that Supporting Actor category). For the time being, it keeps any frontrunners a happy mystery. Check out the nominees and my brief knee-jerks after the jump.

Is nomination leader Trumbo really an Oscar threat? Perhaps for Crantson...

My Award Nominations: Best Acting Ensemble

The nominations keep chugging, and today's category is for Best Acting Ensemble. A couple of these films have already had plenty of recognition on the circuit for the group acting, a couple others deserved much more, and the fifth never stood much a chance of getting any sort of awards outside of foreign language prizes.

SAG Awards bolster 'Birdman' for Best Picture, but not Best Actor...

Well, if you don't count Best Stunt Ensemble (which went to the solid work in Unbroken where I had guessed The Hobbit), I aced my SAG predictions...

... and I'm not entirely happy about that.

First of all, let's not dwell on the supporting races or on Best Actress. Those categories are all but sealed up with Patricia Arquette, J.K. Simmons, and Julianne Moore all coming out on top in their respective categories.

Let's also not dwell on Birdman's well deserved victory in Best Ensemble. It may not have been my absolute first choice but its cast was excellent and makes a fine winner. If you want to theorize about how "easy" it is for a movie about ACTING to win with the Screen Actors Guild, go ahead, but this is a merited honour for an outstanding collective performance.

What I think we do need to talk about is Best Actor. I had an unsettling feeling that tonight would be the night when frontrunner Michael Keaton would finally be unseated by Eddie Redmayne for his much more awards-typical performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. I don't want to give the impression that I begrudge Redmayne any accolades he receives for his impressive physical transformation, but this is not the outcome I wanted to see.

Awards Season Primed for Defining Weekend with 2 Key Guilds...

For many pundits, the Oscar race has already settled into a predictable groove, with many people picking Boyhood as the odds-on favourite.

I... am not convinced. Not yet, anyway.

Yes, Boyhood has been winning Best Picture prizes left, right and centre for the last two months, but let's put things into a bit of context: Every award it's collected all season has been from some critics or media group. It's the sort of ambitious, artistically inspired movie that was always going to appeal to them, but these people don't vote on Academy Awards.

There is an Oscar season from years past that immediately springs to mind when I consider the pattern of this season thus far: The 2010/2011 season, in which
The Social Network won every critics honour under the sun before its momentum was snatched away by The King's Speech. When was it that the eventual Best Picture winner made its move? --- At the Producers Guild of America Awards.

Only a handful of surprises in SAG nominations

The SAG awards always present something of an enigma to awards watchers. Their nominating committee is significantly smaller than the full membership who votes on the winners, which often results in one or two out-of-left-field contenders. They also decide their nominees so early, that a few late-breaking juggernauts always miss the cut.

Evidence of both these intriguing qualities were present in this morning's nomination announcement, which otherwise stuck to the script most prognosticators imagine will be unfolding this season.

The biggest surprises came from the ladies' acting categories, which saw Jennifer Aniston break into the Best Actress race for her acclaimed work in the micro-indie Cake. Screeners for that one obviously landed in the right hands at the right time. An even more curious nomination is the one Naomi Watts garnered for St. Vincent, which played well at TIFF (on the inaugural 'Bill Murray Day') but has since been all but forgotten.

Review - Gone Girl

“You don't know what you've got 'til it's...” the tagline for Gone Girl ominously forebodes. That common phrase takes on twisted new meaning in this hotly-awaited thriller from David Fincher, which opens with the voiceover of a man confessing how he wishes he could know what his wife's thinking; pick her brain; see what's on her mind – all worded with a queasy skull-cracking metaphor designed to unsettle us right off the bat. He truly won't know what he's got until she's gone, and when he finds out, he'll wish he never asked.

Like the vanished woman to whom the title refers, Gone Girl has quite a lot – too much, in fact – on its mind. Based on the best-selling pulp novel by Gillian Flynn (who also adapted it for the screen), it's a movie that aspires to be many movies at once, but does not fully succeed at being any of them.

My Award nominations: Acting Ensemble

Oh boy, where to begin. So many of this year's best movies owe much to the work done by their casts; transcending the sum of all the individual performances to become something more holistically powerful than any one actor could ever be (Even though those individual performances were indeed great). Check out the five best Acting Ensembles of the year, as far as I'm concerned, after the cut.

Review - Short Term 12

(This one's up kinda late... sorry!)

“Look into my eyes, tell what it's like,

To live a life not knowing what a normal life's like.”

A sullen African-American teen, Marcus (Keith Stanfield), sits in a small bedroom rapping a cappella to an audience of his youth worker and his goldfish. When we look into his eyes, we can absolutely see that he never has, but has always longed to, know what a “normal” life's like. But for Marcus and the other underprivileged kids living at Short Term 12, the temporary foster care facility that gives this extraordinary little film its title, a normal life seems beyond their reach.

Written and directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, Short Term 12 centres around Grace (Brie Larson), a young woman who works at the home for at-risk youths with her boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr.). As Grace explains to a rookie staffer, their job is not to play therapist or parent, but simply to “create a safe environment”.

SAG winners

So the Screen Actors Guild has had their say, and for the most part, they were in lock step with the beat the season has set so far.

All the expected actors followed up on their BFCA wins two days ago, with the only category of some dispute being supporting actress. Lupita Nyongo's win tonight over chief competition Jennifer Lawrence (who won just last year) seems to have effectively settled that question though.

SAG, PGA Preview

The first of the industry's top guilds to announce their winners for 2013 will be the Screen Actors Guild (broadcast live tonight) and the Producers Guild of America (tomorrow).

All eyes are on American Hustle to snatch SAG's coveted Best Ensemble award, but nothing's ever set in stone. Remember just last year that another starry David O. Russell ensemble piece, Silver Linings Playbook, was also pegged to take this category, only to be trumped by eventual Best Picture juggernaut Argo, despite it not winning any individual acting honours. So it is possible that 12 Years a Slave could still pull the same trick it did at the Globes and the Critics Choice; keeping a lower profile all night before popping up in the final envelope.

Review - American Hustle

American Hustle opens, as one might expect from a movie about scammers and con-artists, with a con job; But not a con job that has anything important to do with the plot. The con job in question is a man's toupée. Spending several meticulous minutes brushing on paste, applying the shabby tuft of a hairpiece, and then elaborately combing over his side hair so that every follicle is in precisely the right place, this man, Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), is attempting to con the world at large into believing that he has no bald spot.

American Hustle, the latest from writer-director David O. Russell's career reinvention as a helmer of madcap character pieces, can itself be described like that toupée: A tangled, messy, unruly concealment of a script littered with bald spots, and yet we can't help but stare in enjoyment at the sight of it. That wig, however insubstantial, is a lot more fun to watch than a head of real hair.

Review - August: Osage County

The Weston family takes dysfunction to a whole new level in John Wells' August: Osage County, based on Tracy Letts' Pulitzer and Tony winning stage production, and adapted for the screen by the playwright himself.

I use the term “adapted” very loosely, because August: Osage County demonstrates very little adaptation in its transition between mediums. The only significant alteration is a divisive new ending tacked on by notoriously editorial executive Harvey Weinstein, which doesn't exactly cast a vote of confidence in Letts' originally dour conclusion. But by most accounts from the Broadway crowd who were fortunate enough to see the play in its intended form, the two-act structure and abundance of spiny dialogue therein has been preserved for the film, virtually to the letter.

SAG nominations

The Screen Actors Guild is the first major trade group out of the gate this year, and even though their nominees are always somewhat predictable, there's always a surprise or two to stir the pot.

Nominees and individual commentaries on the film categories after the jump.

SAG solidifies Argo as Best Picture frontrunner

I was going to liveblog tonight's SAG awards, but the local TV station that was supposed to carry it checked out for the first 40 minutes. By the time they corrected their error, I was too embittered to bother blogging, forced to watch an hour of TV categories before getting back around to the movie ones.

Things shook down mostly according to plan. Daniel Day-Lewis, Anne Hathaway, and Jennifer Lawrence strengthened their holds on Best Actor, Actress, and Supporting Actress respectively. Best Supporting Actor was predictably unpredictable, but it ended up going to Tommy Lee Jones, as likely an Oscar bet as any.

SAG Preview...

Everything has been going Argo's way so far this season, but it might face a road block at tonight's Screen Actors Guild Awards. Actors make up the largest portion of the Academy's voting membership, and while a Best Ensemble win is not out of the cards for Argo's excellent cast, it's not favoured to win anything from SAG.

Rather, the two films poised to get the biggest boost from tonight's proceeding are Argo's stiffest competition for the Best Picture Oscar: Silver Linings Playbook and Lincoln. Either of these movies is in good standing to win the Best Ensemble category (with a slight edge to SLP), and both are first in line to collect a Lead Acting award as well. They'll probably be duking it out in Best Supporting Actor, although that category could go a completely different direction.

The only other film that seems assured of a win is Les Miserables for Anne Hathaway's Oscar destined performance. Still, Sally Field continues to feel like a legitimate dark horse.

Here's hoping Skyfall's fearless daredevils can triumph in the Stunt Ensemble category.

My predictions after the cut.

My Award nominations: Acting Ensemble

Lots of great Ensembles this year, but for me, these five stood out: