Screen Actors Guild Awards plays it safe again

That magical time of year has once again come and gone — the time when all the good street parking outside of Superior Grocers is taken by stretch limousines and low-flying choppers aren’t looking for fugitives, but a photo op instead.

Sensational · Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (pictured above) attended Sunday’s SAG Awards, which honored many previous big-name winners. - Chris Pham | Daily Trojan

Yes, on Sunday, the venerable Shrine Auditorium played host to the 18th-annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, an industry event in which film and television actors celebrate one another’s work. By the time the SAG Awards roll around, all of the year’s Golden Globes, Critics’ Choice Awards and various guild prizes have already been handed out.

Taking place slightly under a month before the Oscars, the SAG Awards represent one of the last harbingers of things to come at the Academy Awards.

It’s interesting to see what kind of acting is finding favor with those who would presumably know the craft best — other actors.

But if this year’s wins are any indication, tastes don’t seem to be changing all that much from year to year. Of the six awards recognizing serialized primetime television, all but one went to the same actor or cast who picked them up last year.

Outstanding performance by an ensemble in a drama series was given to Boardwalk Empire for the second consecutive year. The prize in the equivalent category for comedy series was collected by Modern Family, also for the second year running.

These two awards are perhaps the most closely watched of SAG’s television categories, as they most often parallel the results of outstanding drama and outstanding comedy series in the Emmys — the most prestigious awards for TV.

Admittedly, a SAG Award is hardly a perfect indicator of who will win the corresponding Emmy — appraising a show’s cast is by no means the same thing as appraising the show itself. To evaluate a show through only the lens of acting is to disregard a spate of crucial considerations, most notably writing and directing.

So what are the SAG Awards good for, if not to help place informed bets for the Emmys?

In a perfect world, a person could respond to that question with a straight face and an answer along the lines of “for taking the pulse of the craft of acting.” But with a few notable exceptions, the awards handed out in television categories seemed to recognize flash over subtlety.

If SAG voters had any interest in asserting themselves as tastemakers, or in suggesting that — as actors themselves — they have some greater insight into what great acting truly is, they made some curious choices with Sunday’s awards.

By recognizing Steve Buscemi’s work on Boardwalk Empire with a win in the category of outstanding performance by a male actor in a drama series, voters took a decisive stand against the naturalistic style of acting practiced by Kyle Chandler in Friday Night Lights and Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad.

As far too few know, the late, great Friday Night Lights offered a portrayal of small-town life in East Texas that was staggeringly and gorgeously realistic. The show’s authenticity was owed in no small part to Chandler and his brilliant co-star Connie Britton’s incredibly naturalistic turns as Coach and Mrs. Taylor.

Similarly, AMC’s Breaking Bad, which takes place in Albuquerque, N.M., is made all the more real by Cranston’s simmering portrayal of the incredibly complex and unspeakably troubled Walter White.

By rewarding Buscemi’s comparatively less subtle performance as Nucky Thompson in Boardwalk Empire, SAG seems to suggest that gimmicks are in and real life is out.

Disappointingly, the award for outstanding performance by a female actor in a comedy series was an appropriately farcical affair. No disrespect meant to Betty White, but the 90-year-old’s win felt pointedly obligatory, particularly considering that she’s won her category every year since being named SAG’s Life Achievement Recipient in 2009.

Elka Ostrovsky, White’s character in Hot in Cleveland, is little more than a set piece that stands and spouts jokes, and although Modern Family is hardly in need of a cheering section, Julie Bowen’s spot-on performance as harried housewife Claire Dunphy was infinitely more deserving.

Like White’s, Alec Baldwin’s win for his embodiment of 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy felt similarly inevitable: It was his sixth-consecutive year picking up the trophy for outstanding performance by a male actor in a comedy series.

And Jessica Lange, who accounted for the only new blood in the night’s awards for serialized primetime TV, received the trophy for her entrancingly anachronistic performance as aging Southern belle Constance Langdon in American Horror Story.

In this case, it wasn’t the sexagenarian’s body of work that justified an obligatory award.  Rather, for the second time that night, her fellow actors appeared simply to be indicating a preference for performances that tended toward the colorful rather than the understated.

Considering the slew of repeat victories, it’s unsurprising that nothing earth-shattering resulted from Sunday’s SAG Awards. But next year, voters would do well to put aside the popularity contest and recognize those who do what only the best kind of actor can do — make the viewer forget that they’re acting at all.

Louis Lucero II is a senior majoring in environmental studies. His column “Small Screen, Big Picture“ runs Tuesdays.