One Category at a Time: Best Actor

Dammit, SAG. Y'know if it weren't for you, this would be one of the easiest calls of Oscar night. So utterly dominant was one contender for so much of the season, it seemed unthinkable that we'd have this tight a race for Best Actor, but so it is. It's a true two horse sprint to the finish in one of those rare categories that we know La La Land can't win.

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: Leading Actor

It wasn't as slim a year for Best Actor candidates as many pundits would have you believe. There were some sterling performances out there beyond Casey Affleck's slam dunk Oscar nod, if you knew were to look. Here are my five:

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: Actor

This field wasn't really as big a yawn this year as the Oscar lineup makes it seem... You just have to look for exceptional performances in the right places, and there were surely more than five that I consider worthy. Check out my Best Actor picks after the cut.

One Category at a Time: Leading Actor

After several years of stacked competition, we find ourselves in the rare situation of Best Actor being the most lackluster of the four acting categories. All the better for the current frontrunner, who's been hungering for an Oscar for some time, and now has virtually no competition to bar him from claiming it.

Best Performance by a Grunter in a Leading Role

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...

Early Oscar Predictions: The Actors

With a shooting script in hand and the stage set, principle photography begins. Directors work closely with their performers and cinematographers to bring the writer's words to life and capture it all on camera.

There's never a dearth of prospective performances that look like they could certainly turn some heads at this early stage of the game, especially in the perennially competitive Best Actor category.

One Category at a Time: Actor

It seems every year that Best Actor is, if not the most competitive Oscar category, then certainly the cruelest. Every season we see at least a half dozen nomination-worthy performances unable to make the final five. The whole Selma and #OscarsSoWhite controversy may have unwittingly made a thespian martyr of David Oyelowo for his tragic snub, but he's in good company with the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal, Ralph Fiennes, Timothy Spall, Channing Tatum, Oscar Isaac, Ben Affleck, Miles Teller, Matthew McConaughey, Andy Serkis, and the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman on the sidelines. There just isn't enough room.

It makes it particularly true that it's an honour just to be nominated for these five men, a couple of whom can relax and enjoy the show with the knowledge that they won't be winning. For those of us who follow this awards madness closely, however, it will be the one suspenseful acting award of the night, as we nervously wait to see if a beloved veteran can fend off the late advances of younger A-listers with more typical Oscar roles.

"Ornithologist, philatelist, philanthropist, Oscar nominee."

Will DGA-BAFTA Weekend Clafiry Some Tight Races?

Final Oscar balloting started today, right on the cusp of a weekend that will unveil the winners of the Directors Guild of America and the British Academy of Film and Television. A number of the Oscar categories still feel maddeningly close a full three weeks after they were announced, so the pending results of this weekend's kudos could be the litmus test we need.

Or they could just be a bunch of red herrings.

Take the Best Actor race, for instance:

My Award Nominations: Best Actor

It seems that every year there are more brilliant leading male performances than five spots can possibly do justice to. Hey, Academy, forget Best Picture... THIS is the category you should expand!

I had no easy task settling on five for Best Actor. Ask me again tomorrow and there could be five new names entirely!

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.

One Category at a Time: Actor

What a tight year it's been for leading actors. We all knew that with such a glut of competition, someone was gonna be unpleasantly stiffed on nomination morning, but few of us probably anticipated that two of the season's top contenders (Robert Redford and Tom Hanks) would end up on the outside looking in. Since then, a clear frontrunner was established who it would be unwise not to predict. However, with an extended waiting period between nominations and voting, not to mention a strange BAFTA snub, there's still a lot of wiggle room. But first, the foremost candidate:

My Award nominations: Actor

What a year for this category. I easily could shuffle out all five of my own Best Actor nominees for the five that just missed and the lineup would still be incredible.

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.

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.

Review - 12 Years a Slave

Two men labor on sweltering a Louisiana afternoon, planing wood and hammering nails into an small unfinished building. To their own eyes, they are equal; sharing conversation and stories of their lives. But equal they are not; one a free white man working for wage, the other a black man in bondage, working simply because it is what he was sold to do. “Your story is amazing,” the free man says to the slave. “And in no good way.” That really is the most essential way to describe the incredible true story of Solomon Northrup, who was kidnapped from his home and family to be sold into slavery. Based on Northrup's 1853 memoir, Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave stares unblinking into arguably the darkest chapter of the United States' history, making a case for itself as the definitive American horror story.

In 1814, still 59 years before the Emancipation Proclamation, Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) lives as an upstanding citizen in Saratoga, NY – an atypically progressive community for its time. A gifted violinist by trade and a decent man by nature, he is free and proud to walk the streets with his family, wearing his finest clothes, frequenting the finest shops, sheltered from common bigotry by his respected status. But this dream existence proves to be just that: a dream – one from which he awakens in shackles, alone and confused in a cold, dark cell. Daring to insist to his captors that he is free man and justice shall be done, he is flogged, menaced, and stripped of his identity along with his bloodied shirt. He is Solomon Northrup no more. He is a “Georgia runaway” by the name of Platt, or so he must pretend if he wishes to survive his waking nightmare.