The 30th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards will be held just down the street from USC at the Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall for the first time since 2020. The show will air live on Netflix on Feb. 24 at 5 p.m. with the pre-show starting at 4 p.m. on Netflix, YouTube and TikTok.
“It’s exciting because of the context of the strike and the gains of that,” said senior creative writing major Isaac Griffiths. “It’s cool to see it happening in the nearby community.”
The SAG Awards were held in the Shrine Auditorium since 1997 until the show was pre-recorded in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For the past two years, the venues were the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica and the Fairmont Century Plaza in Century City.
“I think it’s pretty cool. Hopefully it doesn’t rain,” said Ava Poitras, a junior film and television production major. “That’s crazy I didn’t even know about it. They need to tell people.”
Before this year’s upcoming switch to Netflix, the award ceremony had aired on the channels TBS and TNT for over a quarter of a century. The live production will be produced by Silent Hill Productions in partnership with SAG-AFTRA.
Tickets for the show aren’t open to the public, according to the SAG Awards website. In previous years, a limited number of seats were reserved for SAG-AFTRA members who could enter a ticket lottery to be given a chance to purchase a ticket to the awards. However, according to SAG, due to the Shrine Auditorium’s reduced capacity as compared to prior venues, tickets are only open to nominees, their guests and select executives.
The winners of the SAG Awards are determined through two stages. The first stage decides the nominees, through which two committees, one for television and another for film, vote. The committees are comprised of 2,500 randomly selected active SAG-AFTRA members who have not served on either committee in the past eight years, according to the SAG Awards website.
After the nominations balloting, final balloting is open to all eligible active SAG-AFTRA members who have until Feb. 23 at noon to cast their vote for the winners.
The guild’s self-reported highest accolade, the SAG Life Achievement Award for career achievement and humanitarian accomplishment, will be given to Barbara Streisand, according to a SAG press release. Streisand will be the 59th recipient of the coveted award.
Unlike their other categories, the SAG Lifetime Achievement Award is voted on by the SAG-AFTRA National Honors and Tributes Committee and doesn’t follow the traditional voting format above.
“Barbra Streisand is an icon and unparalleled talent, a force of nature who has seamlessly woven her brilliance through the fabric of our industry,” SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher said in a press release from earlier this month.
Among the media companies represented in the nominees, Warner Bros. Discovery leads the pack getting 20 for its movies and TV with Netflix and Apple trailing behind with 12 and 11 nominations respectively.
Three partially non-English language films were left out of the running for the SAG Awards. The Zone of Interest, Anatomy of a Fall and Past Lives received zero nominations despite the latter two being Oscar-nominated.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the approximately 160,000 person voting body of the SAG Awards tends to be “more populist and less international” than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences’ voting body.
The nominees included Oscar overlaps like Jeffery Wright for American Fiction and Lily Gladstone for Killers of the Flower Moon, and also surprises such as Willem Dafoe for his performance in Poor Things.
The full list of nominees is available on the SAG Awards website.