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Jack’s Award Focus: SAG Award Ballots Mailed to Committee for Nominees

By Jack Gattanella on Tue 26 Nov, 2013

Near the end of last week, the Screen Actor’s Guild of America kicked off their season by mailing out the ballots to the nomination committees.  This is the group that will decide who will be the official nominees for his years 20th annual SAG Awards, and there are two panels, one for film and one for TV, consisting of 2,200 participants all across the U.S.

Not just in film but also in TV, the Screen Actor’s Guild awards are given out for Best Actor, Actress, Supporting Players, as well as Ensemble (sometimes an ensemble can be an indicator for stronger chances at Best Picture at the Oscars, and it’s commonplace for the Best in the film categories to be very strong contenders as well for the Academy).

Once the nominees have been decided by this committee, which should take place over the next month, they will be read live on TV – the deadline for who will be the official actor ballots is December 9th.  Submissions for Actors-in-Consideration were open up until October 24th and there were ‘FYC’ (For Your Consideration) requests submitted by actors or sometimes with permission by producers, studios, networks, agents, managers, or publicists.

In other words, if you’re in SAG (which practically all major players in movies up in the Awards-Circuit this time of the year are), you want to get those requests in.  Narrowing it down, naturally, becomes much trickier, and since this comes just around the same time as the Golden Globes, they become big indicators for the awards season on the whole, mainstream and independent fare included (for TV the same principle, though there’s not as much at stake due to the timing of the Emmy’s).

Unlike the Academy Awards, where the voters with AMPAS cover a wide spectrum of people in the industry, the SAGS are the only awards that are selected only by SAG and AFTRA members (AFTRA being the wing of players in theater and TV).  The SAG awards will take place on live simulcast on will Saturday, January 18th (naturally, check your local listings), and the nominees read December 11th and read by actors Sasha Alexander (TV’s Rizzoli & Isles) and Clark Gregg (Colson in Marvel movies).  As with the Oscar nominations, these will be read on TV in the early morning (for the US – for the UK it may have to be seen online).

Jack is a graduate of film studies from William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ, and is currently seeking his MFA in Screenwriting at the Academy of Art. He is a screen-writer, film critic, director, and editor, and has also done camera-work for web-series, doccumentaries and shorts. Currently Jack is seeking distribution for his feature film drama, “Green Eyes“, co-produced a sci-fi feature, Audrey Lorea‘s ‘Heaven is Now.‘, as well as a comedy pilot called ‘Losers’ which is being shopped around to networks. He is also a contributing writer for the sites FocusFilm.co.uk, Film Forward, and some of his other reviews can be found on his blogcinetarium.blogspot.com. Jack is a vociferous fan of films and will watch anything interesting, foreign and domestic. He survives by his wife, a political science professor, and currently resides in Little Ferry, New Jersey, USA.
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