Were Last Night’s SAG Awards An Omen For A Boringly Predictable Oscars?

For over two decades, the two most frequently cited Oscar precursors have been the Golden Globe Awards and the SAG Awards. Since the SAGs began in 1995, both awards have been a window into where Hollywood’s vibes were at when it came to the town’s favorite movies of the year. When the two precursors are in agreement, that’s a pretty strong indication that an Oscar statue will soon follow. So after last night’s SAG Awards rewarded the same quartet of actors from motion pictures that the Globes did — Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Gary Oldman from Darkest Hour, Allison Janney from I, Tonya — it really does feel like the Oscar winners might already be set in stone before the nominations have even been announced. That takes a lot of the fun out of it.

But is that definitely the case? We’ve written previously that the Golden Globes are losing some of their predictive power. And the SAGs have been known to be off consensus too. In the past two years, they’ve each thrown a Supporting Actor win to someone who didn’t even get an Oscar nomination, in fact (Aaron Taylor-Johnson at the Globes last year; Idris Elba in 2015). Of course, in both of those cases, SAG and the Globes weren’t in agreement.

So how often does this lockstep happen? In the 23 years that the SAG Awards have been around, only FOUR times have the four SAG winners also been the Globe winners:

• 2014: Eddie Redmayne, Julianne Moore, Patricia Arquette, J.K. Simmons
• 2010: Colin Firth, Natalie Portman, Melissa Leo, Christian Bale
• 2009: Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock, Mo’Nique, Christoph Waltz
• 2006: Forest Whitaker, Helen Mirren, Jennifer Hudson, Eddie Murphy

In three of the four above years, the Oscars went to those same four individuals. In 2006, of course, Alan Arkin (who wasn’t even a Globe nominee) scored the upset over Eddie Murphy to break up the set. So it’s a very small sample size, but 75% is a strong number. It’s also probably worth noting that only twice in those four years did the Best Ensemble winner go on to win Best Picture (The King’s Speech and Birdman: yes; Inglourious Basterds and Little Miss Sunshine: nope).

So is there any reason to hold out hope for Oscar upsets?

There is a LONG time to Oscar Sunday: In two of the three years where Globes/SAG/Oscars all matched, there were a quick four weeks from the SAG Awards to the Oscars. This year, in part due to the Winter Olympics, that’s being expanded to six weeks. Six weeks for voters to get bored with the status quo. Six weeks for Gary Oldman to say something dumb about his domestic-abuse history. Six weeks for Laurie Metcalf to amass even more goodwill somehow. McDormand herself even seemed a bit eager for voters to mix it up during her speech on Sunday night, as she reminded the room (many of them Oscar voters) that there are younger actresses who “need doorstops too.” Hey! Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie are younger actresses!

Oscar voters are a smaller group: The SAG Awards are pointed to as a great Oscar bellwether, because actors make up the largest branch of the Academy. But the size of the voting pool for SAG is massive. It’s the entire SAG membership — over 160,000 members — which just utterly dwarfs the Oscar voting pool. The Academy in its entirety is close to or under 7,000 members. Which is why contrasting the SAGs with the Globes is often so funny. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association numbers around 90 people. That’s why their nominations are always a little bit quirky. The gargantuan size of SAG is probably why, for example, the same TV shows and performances keep winning. The bigger the voting body gets, the more mainstream their choices become, and the longer it takes for them to change theircollective mind.

As the recent Best Picture victories for Spotlight and Moonlight might suggest, the Academy membership, while large, is small enough that passionate pockets of voters could actually make a difference. Three Billboards has proved to be divisive. Divisive like La La Land and The Revenant were? Divisive enough for a movie like Get Out or Lady Bird or The Shape of Water to jump up and take Best Picture? Even if the acting wins seem more nailed down this year, Best Picture could still be in play.

Or else we’re just having a lockstep year, in which case it’ll just have to be an honor for your faves to be nominated.