SAG’s Actor Awards Blind Spot Strikes Again
Several top international contenders were snubbed. What happened? Plus: My dishy night at the New York Film Critics Circle dinner
Greetings from Los Angeles, where I’ll be spending a busy few days trying to peek in on the cavalcade of awards season events happening ahead of Sunday’s Golden Globes. (Got a party I don’t know about? Hit me up: katey@theankler.com.) Virtually every contender you can think of is in town, whether they’re nominated or not. Oscar voting starts on Monday, after all, and like presidential candidates barnstorming a state before an election, every hand you shake before the buzzer goes off could potentially make all the difference.
As a reminder, I’ll be watching the Golden Globes live on Substack and YouTube alongside my colleague Christopher Rosen on Sunday, starting at 5 p.m. PT, before heading out to some parties. Become a Prestige Junkie After Party subscriber now to make sure you’re ready to watch with us! Signing up today also guarantees you’ll get access to our Friday episode of Prestige Junkie After Party, where I once again recruit an all-star lineup of guests to ask a simple question: What’s one prediction for Hollywood in 2026?
One thing nobody predicted during that episode — but everyone probably should have guessed — was that One Battle After Another would not just score big with Wednesday’s Actor Awards nominations (formerly known as the Screen Actors Guild Awards), but actually set a new record with seven nominations. Paul Thomas Anderson’s awards season juggernaut received five nominations for individual actors — Leonardo DiCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro and Teyana Taylor — plus nods for its stunt and acting ensembles. The neck-and-neck race between One Battle and Sinners at Sunday’s Critics Choice Awards was reflected with the SAG-AFTRA voters, too. Sinners came in a strong second at the Actor Awards (I will never get used to calling them this!) with five nominations — including a true shocker for 20-year-old supporting actor Miles Caton, who made the cut over his veteran co-star Delroy Lindo, and another nomination for Wunmi Mosaku, who has been on our radar at Prestige Junkie After Party as a darkhorse contender hiding in plain sight since early November. (See, if you had signed up by now, you would’ve already known this!)
But the real surprise of the Actor Award nominations was the absence not just of Norway’s ensemble family drama Sentimental Value — which even missed a nomination for Oscar supporting actor frontrunner Stellan Skarsgård — but of any international feature at all. No Wagner Moura for The Secret Agent in best actor, no surprise acknowledgement for contenders like It Was Just An Accident and Sirāt — nothing for any Neon film, a true stunner given the studio’s dominant role in awards season thus far and its success last year with Anora (which landed three nominations from the guild, including one for its ensemble, a bellwether for its future Oscar success).
SAG-AFTRA is a broad union with more than 160,000 members, most based in the United States, and it has historically whiffed on recognizing international performers who later score with the more globally-minded Academy. Among recent Oscar nominees from international titles to miss with the Screen Actors Guild: Fernanda Torres for I’m Still Here, Sandra Hüller for Anatomy of a Fall, Penélope Cruz for Parallel Mothers, and Antonio Banderas for Pain and Glory. But even with that spotty track record, Sentimental Value is such a showcase for its actors — and also about actors — that I really thought the group would recognize the ensemble full of the kind of roles any actor would kill for.
Still, while it seems likely this is just a blip on the radar for people like Skarsgård and Moura — both of whom should remain firmly entrenched in Oscar predictions — there is what feels like a very obvious decrease in Wicked energy. Last year, Wicked blew the doors off SAG with five nominations, including unlikely recognition for Jonathan Bailey in best supporting actor. This year, Wicked: For Good nabbed just one nomination — for Ariana Grande in supporting actress — and was snubbed in ensemble and best actress for Cynthia Erivo. Barring an upset win for either Grande or Erivo at the Golden Globes on Sunday (where Wicked: For Good was somehow left out of the best musical/comedy field, yikes), its chances are… melting.
You know where you can find nothing but momentum and good cheer in awards season, though? An awards dinner where all the winners are announced in advance, the cocktails have clever names that reference the year’s biggest movies (see above) and the dessert plate is generous. Ahead, my night at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards on Tuesday, including a major star’s surprise dip in a koi pond and a few bits of Oscar buzz, too.
New York, New York
There was a moment during Tuesday night’s New York Film Critics Circle dinner at Tao Downtown when I realized what this event does better than any other awards show of the year: It gets the crowd to actually shut up and listen.
The person speaking in that moment wasn’t a winner or even a major player in this year’s awards season (despite being excellent in A House of Dynamite, I swear). But Broadway veteran Tracy Letts really knows how to command a room, and in his moving tribute to best international feature winner The Secret Agent, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and actor had attendees in the palm of his hand. I watched someone at the neighboring table open a bottle of wine with a soft crack and wince at the interruption.
Letts’ combination of sharp humor and gravitas was emblematic of the whole vibe on Tuesday night. Winners like The Secret Agent director Kleber Mendonça Filho and star Wagner Moura (best actor), One Battle After Another director Paul Thomas Anderson (accepting the best film honor) and especially It Was Just an Accident filmmaker Jafar Panahi (best director) delivered speeches that made time for inside jokes (including a couple of zingers directed at this year’s NYFCC chair, my good friend David Ehrlich, who started the evening with a very lengthy but well-received introduction) as well as serious acknowledgements of the dire state of world news.
There were also moments of sheer lightness. When fashion designer and Marty Supreme scene-stealer Isaac Mizrahi presented his film’s co-writers, Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, with best screenplay, he joked about wanting to wrap the show up before a Golden Girls marathon on the Hallmark Channel. (He also quoted his own Marty Supreme character, comparing being able to present the award to Safdie and Bronstein to “getting my cock sucked by a vacuum cleaner.”) At the end of his own speech, Anderson called back to Mizrahi and closed with the line, “Let’s all go watch The Golden Girls.”
But it was mostly sincerity that ruled the long, untelevised evening, which allows winners — who have over a month to prepare — to ditch the road-tested speeches given in televised ceremonies and run long. If Benicio del Toro also wins supporting actor at the Golden Globes on Sunday, he probably won’t pull out a basketball metaphor to describe his character, Sensei Carlos, as “the sixth man” of One Battle After Another. If Safdie and Bronstein win again for their screenplay, they’ll likely go a little shorter on their long and winding speech — and certainly, for reasons that sort of made sense at the time, but probably are too complicated to explain fully, won’t have Mikhail Baryshnikov standing behind them while they do it.
(Okay, the tl;dr: Baryshnikov was in attendance to present best documentary to My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, and multiple winners referenced his presence to the point that Mizrahi took it upon himself to invite the legendary dancer up on stage to stand awkwardly behind Safdie and Bronstein while they spoke.)
Like any good party, the New York Film Critics Circle is best experienced and not described afterwards. The food is good (try the cod!), the crowd is lively and even the long speeches are entertaining — you’ll just have to take my word for it. I’m also hesitant to assign too much Oscar race significance to anything that happened in that fairly small room, even if Anderson, My Undesirable Friends documentarian Julia Loktev and other winners seem very likely to be giving many more speeches as the season continues.
However! It’s simply human to see someone give a great speech and want to see them give another, and I felt that particularly strongly watching Weapons star Amy Madigan accept her second best supporting actress statue of the week, following her Critics Choice win on Sunday. Introduced by Gaby Hoffmann, who played Madigan’s onscreen daughter in Field of Dreams and Uncle Buck (someone give Hoffmann a call to present at another awards show; she killed it!), the veteran actress was energetic and sincere, expressing her ongoing awe that an over-the-top villain performance in the horror movie Weapons has brought her this kind of recognition in her mid-70s. The room, enthusiastic for every winner, seemed to noticeably perk up when Madigan was onstage. A friend leaned over to me early in her speech and proclaimed confidently, “She’s going to win the Oscar.” In that moment, I really couldn’t help but agree.
And finally, though Ethan Hawke often attends the New York Film Critics Circle dinner as a presenter, he was in especially top form in his tribute to If I Had Legs I’d Kick You best actress winner Rose Byrne, who is, of course, married to his Blue Moon co-star Bobby Cannavale. Dressed with a bit of extra sparkle, as he has been often this season, Hawke gave a funny and enthusiastic speech in honor of Byrne’s many talents — including her scathing Goodreads review of his debut novel, The Hottest State (“It reads like a poor man’s attempt at a Ryan Adams song”).
Then, he made a splash.
Hawke, who, like Byrne, is now an Actor Awards nominee and seems earmarked for Oscar recognition, accidentally stepped into the koi pond at the back of the stage as he and Byrne were leaving to return to their seats. “I went in the water!” he proclaimed to the crowd to healthy applause and laughter. Let’s see the Globes top that.