Tonight at 8 p.m. on TNT, the Screen Actors become the third guild to shepherd in their choices on the heels of a rather dramatic King's Speech coup of the PGA and DGA. Will they join the tide? Will they pull The Social Network back into the fray? Or, will they go a totally different direction?
The SAG is not the guild to end all guilds. Over the last few years, its top prize, the Best Ensemble award, has gone to: Inglourious Basterds, Slumdog Millionaire, No Country for Old Men, Little Miss Sunshine, Crash, Sideways, The Lord of the Rings, Chicago, Gosford Park and Traffic. Six of the last ten years, the Ensemble winner has not gone on to win Best Picture. Three of the four times it has happened, it's been a "sweep" year; Crash is the outlier (its only guild win before winning Best Picture was here).
I've been saying The Fighter would win this award for weeks, and I'm not going to back down from that now that King's Speech has won the DGA. I think Fighter has enough heft to give it this award over King's Speech, if only because it is more of a full ensemble work, and because the SAG more often than not goes for films with more than three major roles (No Country is, of course, a bit of an exception).
What it's basically come down to is that The Social Network needs to win this award. It will win the Writers Guild award for Best Adapted. If it doesn't win here it will have only one major guild to win to The King's Speech's two (or three). The actors are the biggest branch of the Academy. The Social Network needs their weight. Or rather, The King's Speech needs to not win. Its steam needs to be diluted as we move from the major guilds to the tech guilds, where Social Network can regain some steam from the editors guild, the cinematographers and others.
Okay, so what of the other categories? The Actor and Actress will go to Firth and Portman, but I think I'm going to switch up my Supporting predictions, despite my belief The Fighter can still win the Ensemble. Logically, it would need to win Supp Actor and Actress to then receive the votes for the main prize, but because I see the Academy voting body going in directions different from the Globes, I feel compelled to think SAG will throw a wrench into some supposed frontrunners. Namely, Geoffrey Rush will beat Christian Bale as part of The King's Speech's growing momentum, and Hailee Steinfeld will miraculously pull past Melissa Leo to give True Grit some serious contention in a Top 8 category.
Here's what I'm picking tonight, half for fun:
Best Ensemble: The Fighter
Best Actor: Colin Firth, The King's Speech
Best Actress: Natalie Portman, Black Swan
Best Supporting Actor: Geoffrey Rush, The King's Speech
Best Supporting Actress: Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit
No guts, no glory? We'll see. I'm itching for a mix-up in the acting categories (except for Actress; I want Portman's win to be secured).
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