SAG Awards: December Dramas Overlooked or Snubbed?

As Hollywood mourns the loss of the Golden Globes telecast and anxiously awaits to see what's in store for the Academy Awards, another major awards-season issue has gone virtually unnoticed: that many outstanding performances that reaped Globe nominations were shut out of the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Maybe the films were intentionally snubbed because voters thought they lacked great performances. Or perhaps performances in films released in December, when studios traditionally release their potential award winners, were overlooked because SAG's nominating process was completed two weeks earlier than in past years. We think the latter is more likely. Let's look at some of the films whose actors did not receive SAG nominations: Charlie Wilson's War, The Kite Runner, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and Atonement. These aren't run-of-the-mill summer blockbusters. Yet it's odd that the Golden Globes -- which released its list of nominees Dec. 13, five days before the guild's nomination deadline -- managed to include many of them.

Atonement (in limited domestic release Dec. 7) dominated the Globes with seven nominations, including nods for best drama and actors Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, and Saoirse Ronan. The Kite Runner (in limited domestic release Dec. 14), Sweeney Todd and Charlie Wilson's War (both released domestically Dec. 21), and The Great Debaters (released domestically Dec. 25) also got best-picture nominations, and some actors in those movies -- Tom Hanks of Charlie Wilson's and Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp of Sweeney Todd -- earned nods as well. Even John C. Reilly of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, released Dec. 21, earned a Globe nomination.

This makes us extremely suspicious that forcing the 2,100 members of SAG nominating committee's film panel (another 2,100 vote for the TV categories) to make their selections by Dec. 18 -- the deadline has been in January in past years -- had an unexpected consequence: Many of the voters had not attended screenings or received screeners of the films with December release dates. (In comparison, the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which awards the Golden Globes, number fewer than 100 and, as part of the press, have perhaps better access to screenings.) True, the early deadline gives the union's entire voting body more time to select its winners from the nominees -- but perhaps at a cost to many actors who delivered noteworthy performances. By solving one problem -- the two-week turnaround crunch in January -- the guild has created a new one.

Given the tendency of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to honor performances first recognized by the Screen Actors Guild Awards, this doesn't bode well for December-film actors who hope for Oscar nominations. Look at three of last year's Oscar winners: Forest Whitaker, Helen Mirren, and Jennifer Hudson had won SAG Awards and Golden Globes for their performances in The Last King of Scotland, The Queen, and Dreamgirls, respectively. The same thing happened in 2006 with Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote), Reese Witherspoon (Walk the Line), and Rachel Weisz (The Constant Gardener), who also landed Oscars, Globes, and SAG Awards.

The Academy is probably more worried about whether there will even be an Oscar ceremony this year than about whether its voters will follow the lead of other awards shows.

Yes, all discussions ultimately lead back to the strike. But once things settle down and the writers have returned to work, we hope SAG can spare a little time to reassess its awards process and consider restoring a later deadline. We're confident most actors would consider it wise.