Netflix’s big award-show outing needs another year to work things out, perhaps.
There were tremendous moments in the Screen Actors Guild Awards broadcast — for instance, Jane Fonda’s lengthy and complex acceptance speech for her lifetime achievement award. But every such moment seemed oddly abbreviated or complicated. Fonda was interrupted, randomly, by an announcer’s voice ushering her off mid-sentence, before she went on to urge fellow attendees to act as if they were in a documentary about historical prejudice, because, as the Trump administration disassembles the federal government, she said, “this is our documentary moment.”
Especially in its early going, the ceremony felt glitchy and ad-hoc, a sad thing for one of the three major televised awards broadcasts — and the one that, this year, falls a week before the Oscars. Host Kristen Bell threw back to various moments in her career — singing a “Frozen” tune in the monologue to shout out actors’ beginnings; playing at being the voice of “Gossip Girl” during the ceremony — in a manner that felt more in service of the cause of Kristen Bell Awareness than of the ceremony. And relatively deep into the ceremony, SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher reminded us how far past the 2023 strikes we’ve come by speaking not as the inspirational figure she once was but as an… influencer? (In acknowledging the impact of the Los Angeles fires, Drescher, a tremendous advocate for the actors’ cause, encouraged the crowd to read the work of Eckhart Tolle.)
With that said! Funky sound and a replacement-level host can be overcome. A ceremony is largely made by its winners. On the TV side, Selena Gomez — happily freed, in this case, from the baggage of her “Emilia Pérez” costar Karla Sofía Gascón — made for a charming avatar for the “Only Murders in the Building” guys, in absentia, and the “Shogun” crew remains gracious and thoughtful.
As regards film, Timothée Chalamet and Demi Moore made for great winners in the lead categories; the former looked forward, aggressively making the case for himself as a future great, while the latter looked back, thinking about first getting her SAG card and the struggle that came after. Chalamet, claiming his first win of the season, came as a surprise, and both his leather ensemble and his un-humble declaration of his plans for the future marked him as a refreshingly different kind of star.
(As a side note: Practically every film award winner — led by Kieran Culkin — made a point of emphasizing how heavy the award was, and then putting it down on the Plexiglass table to the side. This isn’t a Netflix issue, but — the whole point of awards shows is to photograph the winner holding the prize! If you need a separate table to hold the award, it might be time to scale the trophy down, a bit.)
Ending with the surprise-sort-of honoring of “Conclave,” the SAG Awards leave the season — concluding next week — wide open. But unlike the season-opening Golden Globes, they lacked a host who could hold the show together (Kristen Bell ending the show throwing back to the time she cried about sloths on “Ellen” in 2012 suggested she is not really interested in looking to the future) and a certain sense of stagecraft. Those of us hanging on every single envelope opening will tune in every year, but that audience deserves a bit better.
