The Shrine Auditorium near USC hosted Sunday night’s star-studded SAG-AFTRA Awards. The annual show celebrates the year’s best in film and television.
Kristen Bell hosted the show. The actress brought the audience back to her “Frozen” days by singing a parody version of “Do you want to build a snowman?” but instead, calling it “Do you want to be an actor?”
Across the street from the Shrine at USC, students watched the show on TV. Among them was sophomore communications student Maya Stoudamire, who liked this year’s host.
“I liked how she kept it really light-hearted,” Stoudamire said, “and her jokes weren’t really, like, deprecating of anyone, which I appreciated, because sometimes hosts can be kind of mean, and everything felt really supportive.”
Stoudamire was happy that the cast of the Vatican political thriller “Conclave” won the award for Best Film Ensemble.
“They were really cohesive. And like, I don’t know, I just the movie was really good, and I felt like I was in the Conclave with them.”
SAG Award history was made when Timothee Chalamet became the youngest person ever to win Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role for his for his portrayal of singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in the biopic, “A Complete Unknown”.
“I want to be one of the greats,” said Chalamet, who is 29. “I’m inspired by the greats.”
Stoudamire, the communications student, said she admires the actor’s ambition: “To see him being so young and making history and being so happy to do it and working so hard it. It’s like inspirational lowkey, like, I just think it’s awesome”
But Xiaoning Zhang, a graduate studying film and TV production, was less impressed.
“I don’t like ‘A Complete Unknown’ at all,” Zhang said. “I think it’s very mid. I don’t like the pacing. The story was bad.”
Some USC students didn’t like the pacing of traffic around the Shrine, either. Streets were closed for the event, making it hard for students like sophomore Sasha Zohar, who lives near the Shrine, to get around.
“It was a big inconvenience,” Zohar. “We were trying to get places, and all of our Lyfts kept canceling on us leading up to it, and just it was hard to get anywhere on Jefferson because Jefferson was closed.”
The traffic was unpredictable, and, that’s true also for this season’s film awards. The SAG Awards can often hint at who might win at next week’s Oscars.
This year’s SAG awards went to actors of all ages; the prize for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role went to Demi Moore, 62, for her role in “The Substance.” And 87-year-old acting legend and activist Jane Fonda was honored with a lifetime achievement award.
Fonda has been politically outspoken since the Vietnam War. Last night, she urged people “to resist successfully what is coming at us.” She said, “Make no mistake... empathy is not weak or woke... ”
Fonda’s call to action impressed Maya Stoudamire.
“I think it’s important to have people who are brave enough to take moments like that and speak on what they think matters,” Stoudamire said, “and call attention to it in such a public thing that some people are watching and people are gonna repost on social media.”
Fonda concluded her speech with an uplifting message: “We must not isolate. We must stay in community. We must help the vulnerable. We must find ways to project an inspiring vision of the future, one that is beckoning, welcoming.“