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SAG Ensemble: Strong Three Billboards Win Means It’s Over?

So, as explained, Three Billboards did very well with the Screen Actors Guild. McDormand and Rockwell took acting prizes and the entire ensemble also triumphed. Only The Help has ever achieved three here, including Best Ensemble, and then gone on to lose Best Picture.

So does it mean it is over? Again, not so fast. The SAG Awards can be inherently capricious given the breadth and nature of the composition of their electorate, which includes a lot of radio and TV people. Many years they tend towards movies with racial themes such as Hidden Figures, The Help, and of course this year’s winners, and those movies do not really figure seriously in the Oscar conversation (though both of those lacked a Best Director nod—it remains to be seen whether Billboards will be OK there).

So what does it all mean?

One way to read the stats is to give Shape the edge by noting that Three Billboards is a divisive film and that it therefore clearly lost a preferential vote. But the only evidence that 3BB is divisive is an inference based on the PGA result. One could argue based on Film Twitter or on its utter lack of any presence whatsoever with critics to say that it is divisive, but that seems a thinner reed.

But if the movie’s PGA loss means it was too divisive to win, then why did Moonlight win under a preferential ballot despite losing at PGA? Why did Spotlight. The reality is that the PGA is a good bellwether but that is all it ultimately is: a signpost. The same goes for SAG of course, and statistically the PGA has had more success. It really can go either way in that sense.

You can of course argue that the PGA losers but eventual Oscar winners of the last two years were not divisive. They were just equally as popular as the PGA winner and peaked at the right time. Indeed, The Big Short was having its moment in the sun during PGA voting, only to completely fade after the Oscar nods with the other guilds. La La Land was still riding high before being the subject of a powerful and effective takedown campaign. The Shape of Water, by contrast, has been flying under the radar and arguably has just now starting to peak. This could mean that the PGA stat is back.

I normally would never trust a SAG win as a sign of a Best Picture win. Birdman got the SAG win to line up with its Oscar win. But overall SAG is at about 50% if not slightly less, in its twenty-four years of existence. Remember The Full Monty? Of course not.

My money is still on Three Billboards. While I and my fellow critics do not like the movies’ facile racial answers, the public likes it, and the industry clearly likes it as evidenced by the Globes and SAG resounding triumphs. The only way it loses right now, in my mind, is if it somehow misses Best Director, but I do not expect that to happen.

And the only way for The Shape of Water to beat the daunting stat that no film other than in the first year of the SAG has won Best Picture without a SAG Ensemble nod, is for it to not be too far behind Three Billboards after the first preferential round. At that point, yes, I could see the merman winning. After all, The Shape of Water is widely expected to have double digit Oscar nominations on Tuesday morning and to more than trounce all the other competition. No one will come close. We know that most Oscar nods does not mean a win anymore (remember The Revenant, La La Land’s record tying nods, Benjamin Button, etc.?). But it does mean that it will have broad support such that it could be lifted up in the second round of a close race.

Exciting!

Up Next: Final Predictions!!

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