In essence, SAG is a gang of prissy millionaires all threatening to go on strike because they don’t get paid enough.
But it’s more than that, you know – SAG also holds an incredibly important awards ceremony each year, too. The SAG awards help to dictate the Oscar winners each year, by basically copying the Golden Globes and then standing around hoping that nobody notices. Which, so far, they haven’t.
And, as such, the big winner at last night’s SAG awards was Slumdog Millionaire, which not only won Best Picture, but also Best First Half Of A Movie and Drippiest Ending.
You’d think that SAG had better things to do than hold awards shows at the moment, wouldn’t you? The union is currently poised on the verge of a civil war over a potential strike that could lead to the unthinkable – that’s right, a slightly longer wait than usual to see films that you weren’t even bothered to see in the first place. It’s literally a nightmare.
But still, last night’s SAG awards gave the acting community a rare day off from the stresses of its strike impasse to do the one thing that it does better than anyone else – throw on some nice clothes and crow on forever about how brilliant and important it is.
And, make no mistake, the SAG awards are important – they’re a heavy indicator to the results of the Oscars, along with only three or four thousand other smug, attention-seeking movie awards shows that tend to take place at this time of year. So with this in mind, who came out on top at last night’s SAG awards?
Well, we’ll start by dismissing the Best Actor and Best Actress awards, because they were won by Sean Penn and Meryl Streep – both such icons of the acting community that they probably still would have won had they starred in that air freshener commercial about the boy who gets offended at how much his poo stinks.
The Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress SAG awards were also pretty much an inevitability – Heath Ledger won his for The Dark Knight while Kate Winslet won hers for Nazi Girls Gone Wild, or whatever that film of hers is called.
And, really, that just left Best Picture. And we’re going to dismiss that as well, because Slumdog Millionaire win it and it’s already won all kinds of other awards, plus the ending’s a bit wet and we can’t help shaking the feeling that people only give it awards so that they can gloat about their own diverse tastes in movies afterwards because of all the brown people that are in it.
So that’s it, really. The SAG awards were a bit of a washout, with awards either going to established awards favourites or the usual cast of Serious And Respected Actors. And nobody even took the time to indulge in the most SAG-y pasttime of all – literally comparing themselves to God. Did they, Variety?
“I don’t mean to embarrass anybody by comparing the actor to God, but once we’ve taken the role, we have a similar responsibility to breathe life into that role, and only the actor can do that.”
Thank you, James Earl Jones. You had us worried there for a minute.