The 2010 SAG Award nominations have been announced. The biggest surprise among the feature nominees was that I got 13 out of the 15 names right. The two that got away were Diane Kruger as best supporting actress for Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds and Lone Scherfig's An Education for best ensemble. I had the former in the "less likely" list; the latter in the "strong possibility" list.
The inclusion of Kruger and An Education are the two biggest surprises among the SAG nominations as well. For supporting actress I expected Julianne Moore to be shortlisted for A Single Man — or that perhaps Emma Thompson for An Education or Samantha Morton for The Messenger would sneak in and join Penelope Cruz for Nine, Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga for Up in the Air, and Mo'Nique for Precious. But no.
To the best of my knowledge, that's Kruger's first mention so far this awards season. Even fellow Inglourious Basterds player Melanie Laurent got a nod from film critics earlier this week. Anyhow, SAG voters (at least enough of them) felt differently than critics' groups when it came to Kruger's performance.
An Education, on the other hand, wasn't exactly unexpected. The surprise about its nomination is that only one cast member got an individual nod: Carey Mulligan (above, with Dominic Cooper) for best actress — whereas Jason Reitman's Up in the Air received no less than three individual nods: the two aforementioned best supporting actresses and George Clooney for best actor.
I'm assuming that supporting players Melanie Lynskey, Jason Bateman, Amy Morton, J.K. Simmons, Sam Elliott, et al. must have been so horrible, but so horrible that they sucked out all the good will bestowed on the three Up in the Air principals. Can't think of any other explanation for a film with three individual acting nods not landing a best ensemble nomination as well. (With the Oscars, you can find mismatches because different branches vote in different categories. But with SAG, there's no such division of labor.)
In fact, Up in the Air received more individual nominations than any of the best ensemble (or "performance by a cast") nominees. Lee Daniels's family drama Precious and Tarantino's violent World War II fantasy Inglourious Basterds managed two, while Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker and Rob Marshall's musical Nine received one each. (For the last film, Marion Cotillard has been pushed as "best actress"; she would have had a much better chance had she been listed in the supporting actress category. At the Oscars, Academy members may place their nominees in the category they find most appropriate; at the SAG Awards, the placement is done according to how the performers are categorized in the submissions.)
Those awards make NO sense. How can a movie get three nominations for its cast and not get a best cast nomination? And then comes a movie with two or one nomination for its cast that gets a nomination. Ridiculous.