Because actors constitute the Academy’s largest voting bloc, the thinking goes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards are usually a more accurate predictor of Oscar winners than other awards — but they still get lots of things wrong! Only once in the SAG Awards’ sixteen-year history have all of their winners gone on to win Oscars (it happened in 2004; it almost happened in 1997, but SAG hedged on Best Supporting Actress, with Gloria Stuart tying Kim Basinger, the eventual Academy Award winner). In most years, the actors’ guild correctly predicts only two or three Oscar victors. On Saturday night they distributed trophies to Crazy Heart’s Jeff Bridges and The Blind Side’s Sandra Bullock (in lead), and Inglourious Basterds’ Christoph Waltz and Precious’s Mo’Nique (in supporting). So who will they most likely be wrong about this year?
Until she pulled ahead at the SAG, though, pundits had Bullock still trailing Julie & Julia’s Meryl Streep (nominated for fifteen Oscars and winner of two), with whom she tied at last weekend’s Critics’ Choice Awards and took dual honors at the Golden Globes. And not everybody’s crediting simple momentum for her win: Jeffrey Wells posits that Streep could be splitting votes with former front-runner An Education’s Carey Mulligan, while Gold Derby’s Tom O’Neil wonders if Bullock’s SAG victory only happened because the guild had just last year honored Streep for Doubt (though Streep’s been Oscar-less for the past 27 years).
Until she pulled ahead at the SAG, though, pundits had Bullock still trailing Julie & Julia’s Meryl Streep (nominated for fifteen Oscars and winner of two), with whom she tied at last weekend’s Critics’ Choice Awards and took dual honors at the Golden Globes. And not everybody’s crediting simple momentum for her win: Jeffrey Wells posits that Streep could be splitting votes with former front-runner An Education’s Carey Mulligan, while Gold Derby’s Tom O’Neil wonders if Bullock’s SAG victory only happened because the guild had just last year honored Streep for Doubt (though Streep’s been Oscar-less for the past 27 years).
Working in her favor is that most have liked all of Bullock’s acceptance speeches. And there’s always the slim chance SAG could’ve correctly called all four acting races. But given their track record, our money’s still on Streep.