‘Up in the Air,’ ‘Precious,’ ‘Basterds’ lead SAG noms
If the Golden Globe nominees shook up award season two days ago, then the Screen Actors Guild provided a mild aftershock today.
While most of the contenders are the same, there are some notable exceptions.
Up in the Air, which led the Globe nominations with six, was among the top contenders for the SAG Awards, too. It tied with Inglourious Basterds and Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire with three each.
But while Basterds and Precious both received bids for best ensemble, the acting guild’s version of best picture, Up in the Air was snubbed in that category.
The other contenders were the 1960s London coming-of-age story An Education, the musical romance Nine and the brutal Iraq war bomb-defuser saga The Hurt Locker.
With actors making up the largest voting bloc for Oscars, the Holy Grail of awards season, being left out of their guild’s choice of best picture is a disappointment for Up in the Air. Nonetheless, writer-director Jason Reitman’s story of a corporate downsizer trapped in a life of constant travel picked up more individual nominees than any other film.
A lead actor nomination went to star George Clooney, while supporting actress bids were given to co-stars Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga.
Precious, a drama directed by Lee Daniels about an overweight, abused black teenager trying to survive amid horrible circumstances, split its other two nominations between newcomer Gabourey Sidibe for lead actress and Mo’Nique, who played her psychotically abusive mother, for supporting.
Sidibe’s competition for lead actress is Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side, Helen Mirren for The Last Station, Carey Mulligan’s independence-seeking teenager in An Education, and Meryl Streep as Julia Child in Julie & Julia.
All were nominated for Globes, except Streep was in that award’s musical/comedy category for Julie & Julia.
Meanwhile, Clooney will face off for a lead-actor award with Jeff Bridges’ alcoholic country singer in Crazy Heart, Colin Firth as a gay professor in A Single Man, Morgan Freeman’s take on Nelson Mandela in Invictus, and Jeremy Renner as a bomb-squad technician on the edge in The Hurt Locker.
Those nominations were exactly the same as the Globe contenders for lead-drama actor, except for Renner. Instead, a Globes nomination went to Tobey Maguire in that category for Brothers.
Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s history-bending romp through World War II, collected a supporting-actress mention for Diane Kruger’s German starlet working as an American double-agent, and Christoph Waltz’s bon vivant villainous Nazi.
In addition to Kruger, Kendrick, Farmiga and Mo’Nique, Nine’s Penelope Cruz is also in the supporting-actress race. The difference from the Globes was again only a single nominee รณ Kruger got the bid instead of Julianne Moore, who is up for a Globe for A Single Man.
In the supporting-actor race, the two award shows matched up precisely. Waltz’s opponents in both are Matt Damon for Invictus, Woody Harrelson for The Messenger, Christopher Plummer for The Last Station, and Stanley Tucci for The Lovely Bones.
Directors Tarantino, Daniels and Reitman are not among the nominees, but it’s not a snub. The Screen Actors Guild only recognizes performers, not the other contributors to the filmmaking process.
The 16th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards will be simulcast nationally on TNT and TBS on Jan. 23.
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