74th Oscar Countdown: 13 Days

And now let's recap the Screen Actors Guild Awards, which were presented Sunday night, broadcast on TNT. The SAGs didn't make predicting the Oscars any easier in almost all cases. One category, more than the others, may have cleared up quite a bit with the SAG choice, and that is Best Supporting Actor. For a while, this very tough category seemed to come down to Jim Broadbent and Ben Kingsley, although chances for both did not look that great. Well, the SAGs gave it to Ian McKellen for Lord of the Rings, which was somewhat of a surprise, but that may tell us that he may be the frontrunner for the Oscar in a category that has been searching for a frontrunner for a long time. Best Supporting Actress didn't help much, because Jennifer Connelly, long considered the frontrunner for this award, ended up being nominated in the lead category for SAG. Helen Mirren won the SAG for Gosford Park, but I don't think that win foretells an Oscar win for her. You have to keep in mind that both Mirren and Maggie Smith got Oscar nods from the same film, and that usually means they will cancel each other out, and Jennifer Connelly still is pretty much the frontrunner.

Best Actor went to Russell Crowe, and that still doesn't really help in predicting the Oscar winner, as Denzel Washington still has a number of things going for him at the Oscars. A win for Denzel at SAG certainly would have helped his chances more, but he's still not out of the running. And I was absolutely overjoyed at the nice surprise of seeing Halle Berry win the Best Actress SAG. As I mentioned in my article on Friday, I said that she had to have the SAG to have a serious shot at winning the Oscar, and now it's looking like a bigger possibility that she will go on to make history and win the Best Actress Oscar. Perhaps that huge wave of support for Sissy Spacek has eroded some, and Berry is coming through. She clearly deserves it the most, but her SAG win will make the predicting even more difficult. If Spacek had won the SAG, it wouldn't be a problem predicting at all. But now it's an interesting race, especially with Nicole Kidman in there. So because of these interesting SAG choices, I have to ponder a few more

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