In the heat of awards season, Hollywood’s prestigious guild ceremonies have also become pit stops in the race to the Academy Awards, illuminating lane changes and roadblocks as the industry speeds toward Oscar night. Rack up more guild honors and your performance, your cinematography, your film could capture Oscar glory. The Screen Actors Guild Awards has served as a final pit stop, functioning as a bellwether for Oscar night’s big winner and, at times, a red herring — just ask Ron Howard.
The SAG Awards, now known as the Actor Awards presented by SAG-AFTRA, often prognosticates an Oscar best picture via its ensemble award. Historically, about half of SAG’s best ensemble winners have gone on to claim best picture. But at the start of 1996, the race felt genuinely unpredictable heading into the SAG Awards. The contenders: Howard’s Apollo 13, Braveheart, Sense and Sensibility, Il Postino (The Postman) and Babe.
When Apollo 13 claimed SAG’s outstanding ensemble in a motion picture award — incidentally, in its first year of existence — the pieces seemed to lock into place. Never mind that THR had labeled the film’s first half “undeniably bland” before finding its second half in “bombastic overdrive” in its lukewarm review.
Yet for a movie about teamwork, SAG’s top ensemble prize proved especially apt. Apollo 13 is the story of astronauts, engineers and flight controllers working in concert to solve an impossible crisis. The win affirmed that the film’s power did not come from a single star turn, but from the collective performance of the men and women sweating out the near-disaster in different physical and emotional spaces — a crippled spacecraft, a Houston control room and anxious family homes — yet functioning onscreen as a single organism.
Apollo 13 earned nine Oscar nominations but ultimately lost the top Oscar to Braveheart, as Academy voters gravitated toward a different, bloodier version of the hero’s journey. Still, Apollo 13 was the movie to beat for a moment. The image that endures is the one from the SAG stage, when its cast accepted the ensemble award together — a reminder that this was always, first and foremost, a victory for teamwork.
This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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