The best and worst moments from the 30th SAG Awards
Here are the best and worst moments 2024 SAG Awards, from a Devil Wears Prada reunion to Lisa Ann Walter's odd hot mic bit
Film Features Fran Drescher
Of all the awards shows on the calendar, the SAG Awards has a special place, because it’s all about actors honoring each other. There’s a feeling of community you don’t usually see on other shows. The winners are encouraged to talk about their first acting jobs and what it meant to them to join SAG. The atmosphere is celebratory, with a bit less pressure than the Oscars. That doesn’t mean it can’t tell us anything about what the Academy Awards have in store in just a few weeks. We saw many of the same winners we’ve been seeing all season, thanking many of the same people. It really is a testament to their acting skills that they make their speeches seem genuine and impromptu every time.
In a first for the platform, this year’s show was live-streamed on Netflix. There are still some kinks to work out, clearly. Without commercial breaks (not that we miss the ads) the producers had to fill the time somehow, and their solutions didn’t all work out. It’s also probably not a good idea to tell a room full of attention-seekers they’re not supposed to swear. That’s just asking for a constant blitz of F-bombs. So let’s take a look at all the fucking highs and lows of this year’s ceremony.
2 Comments
I really dislike the decision that has apparently been made in the industry to banish the term “actress” in favor of “female actor”. Yes, we no longer say “authoress” or “poetess” or “woman doctor”, and we’re getting away from “male nurse”, but “female actor” just plays into the antediluvian assumption that everything men do is important and anything women do isn’t. Many years ago a friend of mine (female) who was a theater student explained to me that if you were serious, you were an actor, whereas an “actress” was just frivolous. We are being erased enough as it is. Until my gender changes, I’m an actress.
I’m a little rusty on this but does Drescher truly deserve a victory lap? Everything I knew about Drescher leading up to the strike suggests it was a success despite of her, not because of her. I vaguely remember her not being particularly aggressive or effective in handling the studios on other issues before the strike and it’s also possible there are still some lingering bad feelings over the contentious, bitter, and very very close campaign she and Matthew Modine ran against each other for SAG president.