Hey Oscars, the SAGs Called, They Have Some Ideas

What the Oscars should learn from Sunday night's SAG awards

The SAG Awards happened! Oscars next week! Awards season finale!

In the Northern Hemisphere, summer is for blockbusters, fall is for horror, spring is for Paul Rudd, and winter is for AWARDS.

Thanks to some ancient people’s decision to make the calendar year switch in the dead of winter, film awards for each year are always given in the first months of the new year. That means, in order to ride the power of recency bias, most of the top awards contenders come out at the end of the year.¹

The upshot of all this, which, in fairness, the ancient peoples couldn’t have known: We’re all watching depressing AF filmes when the world is at its literal darkest!???

I saw this tweet a couple weeks ago:

I immediately thought of Best Picture nominee Nickel Boys, which I’ll review in my Oscars preview coming up this week.

Surprisingly, though, this year’s Oscar hopefuls are just that — rather hopeful.

The Best Picture list is led by two humorous and tender movies: Wicked and Anora. Dune Part 2 and Conclave left me feeling glowy rather than flattened. And The Substance had me actually gleeful at its total-wreckage, blood-spattered, no-survivors, body-horror takedown of our twisted, mutilating beauty standards.²

But then there’s The Brutalist [a tragic film about misery and shattered hopes and dreams]. There’s Nickel Boys [a tragic film about misery and shattered hopes and dreams]. There’s A Real Pain [a humorous film about misery and shattered hopes and dreams … and how annoying it would be to have a manic-depressive Kieran Culkin as your cousin]. All movies that I found particularly moving, upsetting, and beautiful in their own ways. And left me staring at the wall.

So: What’s your answer? What movies have made you want to stare at a wall recently?

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The SAG Awards!

I love the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards because it’s one for the actors: the film industry’s hottest and most famous! Yeah, I can be shallow!

Also, in four of the past five years, the SAGs have given their top honor — best ensemble in a motion picture — to the eventual Oscar winner [Parasite, CODA, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Oppenheimer]. 👀 This year: Conclave won it.

They’re similar to the Golden Globes in that they’re for both movies and TV, so some of the public favorites [like The Bear and Abbott Elementary] are represented there.

Sunday night, Kristen Bell hosted, Jane Fonda received a Lifetime Achievement Award, and preeminent movie star Harrison Ford had everyone around him acting like they were just glad to be there.

A few notables or highlights:

• Classic silhouettes are back! Unless you’re Jeremy Strong, in which case it’s all about this Tom Bombadil’s Smoking Jacket-ass suit. Best dressed? Keke Palmer, HANDS BOOTS THE HOUSE DOWN. Who’s your pick?

• Timothée Chalamet won the Best Actor award. I wanted it for Colman Domingo in Sing Sing, but good for Timotay, I guess! Timmy brought his mom as his guest, which WAS cute. His speech was good.

• His top fan account, Club Chalamet, run by a woman in her 50s with a 💫 in her handle, held court on Twitter and told everyone she was so nervous about this award that she ate Honey Nut Cheerios instead of a real dinner.

  • The last time a full-grown adult told me that, it was my husband, and the Cleveland Guardians were about to play Game 5 in the American League championship series.

• “May I introduce Gossip Girl 2.0: The cast of Conclave.” LOL!

• As I am always saying: Give Colin Farrell more awards. He is a GENIUS and an ACTORE, and his speeches always slay, not least because of that killer Irish accent.

• Demi Moore wins again! I’d say she has the Oscar in the bag unless Mikey Madison gets an Emma-Stone-over-Lily-Gladstone surge.

• Jessica Williams and Harrison Ford. See the clip at the top of this email.

• Jessica Gunning from Baby Reindeer said that several of the women nominated in her category were on her “acting vision board.” 🥹 As a fellow vision boarder, I am taking notes!

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What the Oscars can learn from the SAGs

• The Good: CLIPS! The Oscars removed nominee clips recently to try to shorten the ceremony, but like, how about we remove some of the stupid comedy bits or a song or two?? I’m not watching the Oscars just to see people dress up and clap and get played off stage! I’m watching to see clips of REAL MOOOVIES: movies that I never got around to watching, or my favorite parts of movies I did, so I can ooh and aah at “acting!” at “cinematography!” at “sound editing!” I LOVE CLIPS. GIVE US CLIPS.

• The Bad: Make sure the teleprompter works!? So many people got tripped up by what seemed like a poorly paced teleprompter??

• The Bad: Make sure the sound works!? If goddess JANE FONDA has to crack jokes about how bad the sound is in her LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT SPEECH because you played audio OVER HER, you need to reassess your life!!

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Meanwhile, the Oscars are giving … drama!

A meme depicting Mikey Madison from Anora, the Best Picture front-runner, smiling over the grave of Emilia Perez, disgraced *former* Best Picture front-runner (Source: My filmmaker friend Daniel Tucker sent it to me on Instagram)

For the first time in a while, the Oscar Best Picture winner is really up in the air.

• Conclave won the Best Picture equivalent at the SAGs.

• The Brutalist and Emilia Perez [canceled!] won the Golden Globes in their categories.

• Anora won the Critic’s Choice. Anora was the betting favorite after Emilia Perez got embarrassing, but I’m guessing Conclave might edge it out now?

• Does Wicked have a shot since it’s ranked choice, and they might be ranked second on many ballots?

This year’s awards contenders seem to be taking a page out of the “Cardinal Lawrence in Conclave” book: running silent smear campaigns and telephoning petty workplace gossip across the hallways! Ever since the contenders were announced, it’s been one takedown after another. From pop culture guru Hunter Harris:

I’m Still Here Best Actress nominee Fernanda Torres? Did blackface in 2008. The Brutalist used A.I. technology for Adrian Brody and Felicity Jones’s Hungarian language dialogue, “specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy,” according to director Brady Corbet.² Anora didn’t use an intimacy coordinator. Have you forgotten Saldaña’s Nina Simone performance? Ethan Slater’s ex-wife, Dr. Lily Jay, wrote a viral Cut essay about losing her husband to his Wicked co-star Ariana Grande.

And then, the big one: Karla Sofía Gascón, the lead actress of Emilia Pérez, wrote some real bad tweets! Not even like an accidental sext meant for your online paramour and not your partner bad, like “Hitler was just a guy with opinions” bad! I implore you all: Should you ever be so fortunate as to be nominated for an Oscars campaign, delete your tweets! Log off! [Oh also maybe don’t tweet sympathy to Hitler!?]

But also: Emilia Pérez is a TERRIBLE movie. Unwatchable! It is beyond my ability to grasp why it got nominated for so much as a single award. It’s nonsensical and jarring and almost the entire time you watch it, you’re wondering if it is a really long episode of Saturday Night Live. Plus, it’s offensive to every people group it intends to be about: Mexicans, trans people, doctors, lawyers, opera singers, an alternate-reality Selena Gomez who can actually speak Spanish!? [She cannot in this film, that’s for damn certain.]

Laura Bradley, writing for Vulture:

“[M]any of the film’s loudest critics come from the communities it claims to champion. There’s a reason you’re not seeing swaths of trans and Mexican critics mourning the film’s PR debacle. In some ways, Emilia Pérez feels like a parody of a Best Picture nominee — the story of a Mexican trans woman, as written by a Frenchman who admits he conducted little research before making it, and which therefore relies on harmful tropes about both trans people and Mexicans.”

Anyway, I think a lot of the mud-slinging has subsided, and we’re now on a crash course to enjoying the delightful winners of the season, like Demi Moore, Anora, Wicked, and those gossipy priests in Conclave.

That’s all for today! I’m at a work summit for the next few days but will have a preview of my favorite Oscars contenders later this week to prepare our HEARTS.

1. [Except Dune Part 2, which gives no f***s apparently and also suffered from delays, so it couldn’t be part of the LAST Oscars.]

2. [Although maybe this was because I took an edible before I watched it]