The actors have spoken: the Screen Actors Guild has named its nominees for the upcoming 13th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards. And there are some surprising, but hardly unwelcome, names among the nominees. As The Envelope notes, the SAG awards have traditionally been an excellent indication of who will go on to grab an Oscar, and so suddenly, things seem up in the air again. Like for Will Smith and his beautiful performance in The Pursuit of Happyness, whose early buzz for an Oscar nom fizzled once the film was released and it turned out to be rather slender an experience, on the whole, Smith’s excellent work aside [my review]. But now he’s been nominated for a SAG for Best Actor for the film, and his dreams of the little golden guy are surely revived.

The SAG “Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role” noms look suspiciously like an Oscar list to me:

Leonardo DiCaprio, Blood Diamond [my review]
Ryan Gosling, Half Nelson
Peter O’Toole, Venus
Will Smith, The Pursuit of Happyness
Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland

As does the “Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role” listing:

Penelope Cruz, Volver
Judi Dench, Notes on a Scandal
Helen Mirren, The Queen
Kate Winslet, Little Children
Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada [my review]

Supporting noms almost always offer a couple of names no one’s been considering, and that’s the case here, too:

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role
Alan Arkin, Little Miss Sunshine [my review]
Eddie Murphy, Dreamgirls
Djimon Hounsou, Blood Diamond
Jackie Earle Haley, Little Children
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Departed [my review]

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role
Adriana Barraza, Babel
Cate Blanchett, Notes on a Scandal
Abigail Breslin, Little Miss Sunshine
Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls
Rinko Kikuchi, Babel

Alan Arkin and ten-year-old Abigail Breslin? I love Little Miss Sunshine dearly, but these nominations stun me: comedy is so rarely recognized, and child performances even more rarely. The combination of the two here might well be a first. Adriana Barraza’s exquisite performance in Babel likewise is extraordinarily worthy of recognition, but that it actually received it is a delight out of the blue.

One thing I particularly like about the SAG Awards is that they honor ensemble casts — there is a different level of talent and dedication that goes into working together with a large group of costars, and it hardly seems fair to me to ignore these performances precisely because no one performer steals the spotlight:

Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture
Little Miss Sunshine
Dreamgirls
Babel
Bobby [my review]
The Departed

That a few actors are also nominated for their individual work does not negate the shared aspects of an ensemble. My choice here would be for Bobby to take the prize, as the truest ensemble among the nominees.

(SAG pays tribute to TV performances, too — check out the complete list of nominees for those.)

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MaryAnn Johanson
author of The Totally Geeky Guide to The Princess Bride
minder of FlickFilosopher.com