Actor Awards alter Oscar race

Exclusive to MeierMovies, March 2, 2026

The Actor Awards, formerly the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards, were held last night in Los Angeles, and the surprise victories for Michael B. Jordan (as best actor) and Sinners (as best ensemble) have slightly altered the Oscar race.

Until last night, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another had all the momentum, with Timothée Chalamet (for Marty Supreme) the slight favorite to take home the Oscar for best actor. Now that race is less certain.

The Academy Awards, of course, has no prize for ensemble, though the new casting Oscar is comparable. With Sinners’ Actors Awards success, some are now predicting that the film will win that new Oscar category. However, last night’s Sinners victory is unlikely to change the predictions for the best-film Oscar, as One Battle After Another is still the heavy favorite, especially after its recent wins at the Producers Guild Awards and the BAFTAs. And, at least in this critic’s opinion, Anderson’s film is the worthy choice for both categories. (Frankly, I can come up with more than two dozen feature films from 2025 with better ensembles than Sinners. For more on Sinners and its record-tying number of nominations, go here.)

Amy Madigan, of Weapons, was a slight (but pleasant) surprise for supporting actress at the Actors Awards, and her victory throws that category into toss-up status for the Oscars. However, Jessie Buckley’s win for lead actress, for Hamnet, means she’s an even stronger lock for an Oscar triumph. The same holds true for Sean Penn, as supporting actor, for One Battle After Another.

One of the reasons it is difficult to compare the Actor Awards with the Oscars is the difference in voters. Roughly 120,000 SAG-AFTRA members (all actors) voted for the Actor Awards this year while only about 10,000 Academy members will vote for the Oscars. And though actors make up the largest Oscar voting group, they still comprise only about 13 percent of Academy voters.

The Actor Awards themselves were a bit of a disappointment. No pun intended, they sagged. Though Kristen Bell is a talented host, the comedic setups devised for her and almost all the presenters were painfully tedious. And because the show was streamed on Netflix, profanity wasn’t forbidden, and many presenters and recipients, to quote Cosmo Kramer, let the expletives fly. Stay classy, Hollywood.

Speaking of classy, there’s Harrison Ford, who was given the lifetime achievement award. It was the clear highlight of a less-than-overwhelming night, though the in-memoriam section and a rousing Sinners-themed musical performance were also memorable.

Regarding the in-memoriam presentation, if you were watching closely, you saw some interesting historical and artistic coincidences. Yes, there were icons such as Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman, Diane Keaton and Rob Reiner. But 2025 was also the year both Claudia Cardinale and Brigitte Bardot passed. Rival sex symbols, the two stripped each other partially naked in the greatest cinematic catfight of all time, in 1971’s Les Pétroleuses.

Even odder was the close passing of British actors Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar. Among Stamp’s other triumphs was the lead role in William Wyler’s underappreciated mini-masterpiece The Collector, from 1965, in which Stamp’s character falls in unrequited love with Eggar’s character, then kidnaps and accidentally kills her. Creepily, when they were both in college together, Stamp asked Eggar out on a date. She turned him down. And Wyler used that awkward relationship history to further the tension between the two on set.

Let’s hope Cardinale, Bardot, Stamp and Eggar are resolving their rivalries and differences in the afterlife. Probably not, but it makes for cool cinematic anecdotes.

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