This year's Screen Actors Guild Awards provided surprises for the audience and actors alike. Sweeping up SAG awards left and right, the independent and modestly good-humored film, Sideways, won the award for Outstanding Performance by a cast, SAG's equivalent to a Best Picture win at the Oscars®. This leaves Sideways going head to head in a three-way race against the two big competitors for Oscar® gold: Million Dollar Baby and The Aviator.
Grasping other big wins for the night, Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman won Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor for Million Dollar Baby while Cate Blanchett received Best Supporting Actress for The Aviator. Jamie Foxx took home a Best Actor trophy for Ray and reinforced his acting power by noting that his win at the SAG awards, "is actually the beginning and not the end" to this highly competitive award season. In his first Oscar® nomination for Collateral, Foxx takes 74 year-old Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood into the ring to battle over the Best Actor award in which Eastwood is nominated for Million Dollar Baby.
Another ensuing competition is between prize-fighting Hilary Swank and Annette Bening for her role in Being Julia. In 1999, Bening beat out Swank at the SAG Awards for her performance in American Beauty over Swank's Boys Don't Cry. However, Swank ended up taking home her first Oscar® that year. Since both are nominated for Best Actress this year as well, we'll see whether Swank's SAG Award is an accurate prediction for the Oscars®. The SAG Awards are considered a good predictor for the Oscars® because actors are the largest single group voting for the Academy Awards.
The SAG Awards also honored small screen actors as Jennifer Garner was named Best Actress in a TV series for her secret agent role in Alias and Tony Shalhoub won Best Male Comic Actor in a TV series for his obsessive-compulsive detective role in Monk. Great TV shows such as Desperate Housewives and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation won Best Ensemble TV Comedy Series and Best TV Drama respectively.
Stars that graced the Shrine Auditorium included Johnny Depp, Ellen Degeneres, most of the girls from Sex and The City, Don Cheadle, and Charlize Theron among many others. Movie star legends Glenn Close and Geoffrey Rush were also present to receive their SAG awards. Close proved she can do it just as well on the small screen as she can on the silver screen as she took home Best Actress for The Lion in Winter while Rush won Best Actor for his performance The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.
Stay tuned to see what the rest of this exciting award season has in store. Will the underdog Sideways upset the tight race between The Aviator and Million Dollar Baby as it did at the SAG awards? Or, will another dark horse take it away? Will Foxx's fresh acting skills be enough to sweep up Eastwood's long-awaited Oscar®? Who will win the repeat-battle between leading ladies Annett Bening and Hilary Swank? Nothing is certain this award season-except for the fact that everyone will be watching!! |
