What happens at the Oscars when the SAG Awards and BAFTAs disagree on Best Actress?
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For the fourth consecutive year, we’ve got a firecracker of a Best Actress Oscar race. Lily Gladstone took home the Screen Actors Guild Award on Saturday for “Killers of the Flower Moon” over Emma Stone, who had been on a roll since the two won their respective Golden Globes, having pocketed the Critics Choice and BAFTA Awards for “Poor Things.” Now they each have an industry prize and Best Actress feels like a coin-flip. Gladstone has closed the gap on Stone in the Oscar odds since Saturday. Don’t be surprised if she overtakes the top spot soon. But when the SAG Awards and BAFTAs don’t align in Best Actress, which one has the edge at the Oscars?
Since BAFTA became an Oscar precursor 23 years ago, the Brits and the actors guilds have disagreed 13 times in the category prior to the Battle of the Stones. But not all splits are created equally. In some cases, a film is not eligible (usually in the United Kingdom), so a split had to occur. Sometimes a film was eligible, but the actress was snubbed, like this year with Gladstone, who made the BAFTA longlist in Best Actress but was not nominated, meaning she was (clearly) not a jury selection or in the top three in the branch vote that would guarantee a nomination. And there’s also category confusion — nominated in supporting one place and in lead in another. Here are the previous 13 mismatches (years are film release).
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2001
SAG: Halle Berry, “Monster’s Ball” (ineligible at BAFTA; nominated the following year)
BAFTA: Judi Dench, “Iris”
Oscar: Berry
2002
SAG: Renee Zellweger, “Chicago”
BAFTA: Nicole Kidman, “The Hours”
Oscar: Kidman
2003
SAG: Charlize Theron, “Monster” (ineligible at BAFTA; nominated the following year)
BAFTA: Scarlett Johansson, “Lost in Translation” (not nominated at SAG)
Oscar: Theron
2004
SAG: Hilary Swank, “Million Dollar Baby” (not nominated at BAFTA due to late screeners)
BAFTA: Imelda Staunton, “Vera Drake”
Oscar: Swank
2007
SAG: Julie Christie, “Away from Her”
BAFTA: Marion Cotillard, “La Vie en Rose”
Oscar: Cotillard
2008
SAG: Meryl Streep, “Doubt”
BAFTA: Kate Winslet, “The Reader” (also nominated in lead at BAFTA for “Revolutionary Road”; won in supporting for “The Reader” at SAG, Golden Globes and Critics Choice)
Oscar: Winslet
2009
SAG: Sandra Bullock, “The Blind Side” (ineligible at BAFTA)
BAFTA: Carey Mulligan, “An Education”
Oscar: Bullock
2011
SAG: Viola Davis, “The Help”
BAFTA: Meryl Streep, “The Iron Lady”
Oscar: Streep
2012
SAG: Jennifer Lawrence, “Silver Linings Playbook”
BAFTA: Emmanuelle Riva, “Amour” (not nominated at SAG)
Oscar: Lawrence
2018
SAG: Glenn Close, “The Wife”
BAFTA: Olivia Colman, “The Favourite”
Oscar: Colman
2020
SAG: Viola Davis, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (not nominated at BAFTA but made longlist; jury era)
BAFTA: Frances McDormand, “Nomadland”
Oscar: McDormand
2021
SAG: Jessica Chastain, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” (not nominated at BAFTA but made longlist; jury era)
BAFTA: Joanna Scanlan, “After Love” (ineligible in U.S.; none of the six BAFTA nominees were Oscar-nominated)
Oscar: Chastain
2022
SAG: Michelle Yeoh, “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
BAFTA: Cate Blanchett, “TÁR”
Oscar: Yeoh
SEE Full list of SAG Awards winners
If you look at this holistically, SAG has the edge 7-6 as the Oscar fortune teller. But there are four instances in which one of the two winners was ineligible at the other awards show, and in all four cases, the SAG Award champ prevailed at the Oscars (Berry, Theron, Bullock and Chastain). But that’s not surprising since the SAG Awards are a domestic group and most films prioritize U.S. releases for Oscar eligibility.
If you remove these years (can you really hold it against someone if they’re not eligible?), there are nine cases left. The BAFTA champ claimed the Oscar in six cases, while the SAG Awards only saw three conversions. In two of the three SAG years, one winner was snubbed at the other show: Swank was MIA at BAFTA and Riva was MIA at SAG. “Million Dollar Baby” was a very late entry into the race and went on to win the Best Picture Oscar. Would the film and Swank have won at BAFTA had it been screened in time? We’ll never know.
To narrow it down even further, you can look at years in which the SAG and BAFTA winners were nominated by both groups in Best Actress. That gets us to five, eliminating a BAFTA jury year (Davis-McDormand) and the wacky Winslet year, but BAFTA nominating Winslet in lead for “The Reader” instead of supporting — where she had been campaigned all season to avoid conflict with “Revolutionary Road” — foreshadowed what was to come at the Oscars. In four of these five instances, the BAFTA winner triumphed at the Oscars. Yeoh is the only SAG Award champ to defeat the BAFTA recipient when both winners were nominated in Best Actress at both shows, and she headlined an Oscar juggernaut that snagged an unprecedented six above-the-line wins. The four BAFTA-turned-Oscar winners (Kidman, Cotillard, Streep and Colman) won for playing real people in transformative and/or flashy roles over portrayals of fictional characters.
Of course, this scenario doesn’t apply to this year since Gladstone was paid dust by BAFTA. The BAFTAs’ employment of juries for the acting categories — currently, the top three vote-getters in the branch voting are automatically nominated and a jury selects the three other nominees from the longlist — have added a wrinkle to the proceedings. This year is most similar to the Davis-McDormand split three years ago. Back then, the acting categories at BAFTA were fully juried, and McDormand and Vanessa Kirby (“Pieces of a Woman”) were the only BAFTA nominees to get Oscar bids. The Best Actress race that year was also far more chaotic as each precursor produced different winners: Carey Mulligan (“Promising Young Woman”) won Critics Choice, while Andra Day (“The United States vs. Billie Holliday”) and Rosamund Pike (“I Care a Lot”) nabbed the drama and comedy/musical Globes, respectively. In the end, McDormand, the lead of the eventual Best Picture winner, secured her third Best Actress Oscar.
Would Davis and Gladstone have been nominated at BAFTA under normal circumstances? Most likely? Since they were/are top Oscar contenders? Again, we’ll never know. But even before Gladstone’s BAFTA snub, the general sentiment was that Stone would have an edge at BAFTA with “Poor Things” being a British production that also plays well to European tastes. And it did, scoring five BAFTAs total, while “Killers of the Flower Moon” went 0-9 (it had bids in two juried categories, supporting actor and casting). Let’s say Gladstone did get in at BAFTA and lost to Stone as many expected pre-nominations. Then the race would be like the Close-Colman battle, down to the Yorgos Lanthimos film that thrived at BAFTA (“The Favourite” won seven awards).
After BAFTA went 0-8 above the line with the Oscars last year while SAG matched all four acting categories, there might be an impulse to side with the latter now, but this history says BAFTA has a slight upper hand when both Best Actress contenders are eligible, though not necessarily nominated, at both shows. But that also doesn’t mean you should lock in Stone now. Gladstone winning SAG with an internalized performance and less screen time, compared to Stone, is very impressive. The reality is that every race every year is different, even if there might be some surface-level similarities between races. Films are different, performances are different, the competition is different, the mood is different, the narrative(s) are different, the momentum is different. Maybe they could tie? Matching Oscars would go well with their Infinity Stones rings.
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