CHOICES, CHOICES

It’s time for nominators to ask themselves: What makes for award-worthy acting?

By Jack Smart

Dearest SAG Award nominator,

As one of the 2,500 Screen Actors Guild Awards Nominating Committee members, you have the privilege of assessing the most compelling cinema of 2021. Who gave the best performances on the big screen? And which films showcased the strongest ensembles?

In a year full of films delayed due to COVID-19, this is a particularly fun challenge! ’Tis the season for big-budget spectacles, including “West Side Story,” “The French Dispatch,” “F9: The Fast Saga,” “No Time to Die,” and “Dune”—all hits that should have been in the running last year and instead are vying for statuettes now. Throw in the awards fare that arrived on time—buzzy biopics including “Spencer” and “King Richard,” stage-to-screen adaptations like “The Humans” and “Tick, Tick...Boom!” and period pieces “Belfast” and “The Last Duel”—and you’ve got your nominating work cut out for you.

So how will you choose? The pages of these special issues are here to guide you. But our selections for 2021’s most moving, impressive, and memorable actors are just your jumping-off point; how you whittle all of these contenders down to just five nominees per category depends entirely on your taste and instincts. After all, ask 100 movie buffs for their definition of SAG Award–worthy acting, and you’ll get 100 different answers.

Sure, we all know great acting when we see it. But particularly when voters must compare seemingly incomparable performances, it’s helpful to weigh a few factors to see which resonate most with you. Here are mine.

● Head and heart: Every actor uses both of these on camera, of course; but I like thinking about which actors are more obviously cerebral and which give in to their feelings. Sandra Oh shows us the wheels turning in her head on “Grey’s Anatomy,” making her the former; Jennifer Lawrence, swinging between euphoric highs and rageful lows in “Silver Linings Playbook,” feels more like the latter. Do you connect more with an intellectual or gut-based approach to a character?

MATT DAMON AND JODIE COMER IN “THE LAST DUEL”

● Naturalistic and conceptual: This duality appears every awards season. The actors of “Spotlight” played investigative journalists going about their dayto-day lives. Rather than adding affectation or transformation to their portrayals, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams relied on simplicity and mundanity to tell that story. Al Pacino on “Angels in America,” on the other hand, played the histrionic lawyer Roy Cohn, with all his theatrical physicality, unlike anyone we would recognize in our daily lives. Either intimate or overthe-top can work, depending on the film or series, and a single performance can traverse both, depending on what the scene requires. Which should be employed where, and did the actor’s decision work?

● Recreation and invention: There’s a reason so many acting awards go to those playing real figures: Harnessing one’s star power to replicate another recognizable figure will never cease to amaze. So which should we honor—faithful imitation or bold riffs? The best biopic performances do both: Look at Judy Davis on “Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows,” Jamie Foxx in “Ray,” or Daniel Kaluuya in “Judas and the Black Messiah.” When actors are inventing a character from scratch, however, the power of imagination reigns. So lived-in are Viola Davis’ roles on “How to Get Away With Murder” and in “Fences” that you sense you could quiz her on any aspect of her characters’ histories.

What do all of the performances I mentioned have in common? They all earned SAG Awards. This year’s winners will join their ranks, and whether they make the ballot is up to you.

Those are just some elements your humble awards editor examines when choosing between great on-camera performances. What are yours? Come Jan. 12, 2022, SAG Award nominations day, I’ll be excited to find out.

Sincerely,

Jack