Who will win or could win the SAG Awards?

Last year, the Screen Actors Guild Awards had a ready-made anti-Oscar narrative with a slate of winners that features colorful casts (Orange is the New Black) and Idris Elba as the supporting actor winner during the #OscarsSoWhite backlash. This year, there's no clear media narrative and SAG even has to make do without a Best Picture frontrunner since La La Land is understandably not up for their top prize (Outstanding Performance by a Cast... also referred to as "Best Ensemble" by many). So what will they choose this year? Who knows!

Viola has won four SAG awards, two for How to Get Away With Murder, two for The Help

We'll find out tomorrow night but what we're most looking forward to the lifetime achievement tribute to Lily Tomlin which will happily be presented by her 9 to 5 co-stars Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton. But back to predictions. Will Viola Davis win her fifth SAG in five years?  Let's make the tough calls after the jump...

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29 Days until Oscar

29 is the number of the day. It's also the most common age for Best Actress winners. That's quite something if you consider that the youngest best actor winner of all time was 29 and just a month shy of his 30th (Adrien Brody, The Pianist). The gender bias that preferences young actresses and older men gets even worse when you realize that HALF of all Best Actress winners won by the age of 33. Less than 10% of Best Actor winners were 33 and under. The eight women who won at 29 are...

Emma Stone is the youngest Best Actress nominee this year at 28 and expected to win by most pundits. Stone is the same age now as the following winners were: Norma Shearer in The Divorcee, Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve, Luise Rainer in The Good Earth and Charlize Theron in Monster.

Curiously there is no "most common age" for Best Actors (spread out fairly evenly from mid 30s to mid 40s) or Best Supporting Actress (all over the place). The most common age for Supporting Actor winners is 46 (seven winners).

John Hurt and Emmanuelle Riva (RIP)

Two departures to report, both of them Oscar nominees and enduring figures of great cinema. Major British thespian Sir John Hurt and French icon Emmanuelle Riva have died at 77 and 89 respectively...

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The Sex Appeal of Garbo, Valentino and a 150-Year-Old Novelist

By either bizarre coincidence or brilliant intuition, Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino began their careers in nearly the same way. Both achieved overnight success with adaptations of one Spanish novelist, a writer who has almost entirely faded from popular consciousness since then. At the time, though, he was more famous than either actor.

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The Oscar Week: post-nominations, the campaigns rev back up.

In this weekly feature from Murtada we follow Oscar contender appearances and interviews. After taking a week off, contenders are back to the grind for Phase 2.

Supporting Actress
The warmest presence on the Oscar campaign trail is undoubtedly Octavia Spencer. She’s as delightful in interviews and appearance as her Hidden Figures character is on screen, except of course when she’s dealing with Kirsten Dunst’s racist boss. No wonder she’s so popular. On Twitter she acknowledged her nomination by mentioning not only her director and producers, but also her friends from The Help (and fellow nominees this season) Viola Davis and Emma Stone. Then she went further in by congratulating Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, Dev Patel and Denzel washington. How lovely is she?

This week she was honored as Woman of the Year by Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals group. She looked delighted throughout the parade through the streets of Cambridge, to the roast and the presentation of the traditional prize, the pudding pot. That pot, she quipped, was harder to get than an Oscar...

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