Ahead of the Academy Awards next month, Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther emerged as the big winner at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, taking home the evening’s top prize – Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. The ceremony, hosted by Megan Mullaly (Will and Grace), was held in Los Angeles on Sunday.
Black Panther, which is in contention for the Best Picture Oscar, also won the Outstanding Action Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture.
Accepting the award on behalf of the cast, Chadwick Boseman, who played the titular superhero in the film, quoted Nina Simone’s classic song To Be Young, Gifted and Black while referencing the film’s path-breaking success and cultural significance, reported the Entertainment Weekly. The film, set in the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda, has a predominantly black cast that includes Michael B Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Daniel Kaluuya, Letitia Wright and Forest Whitaker.
“We know what it’s like to be told there’s not a screen for you to be featured on, a stage for you to be featured on,” Boseman said. “We know what it’s like to be the tail, but not the head. We know what it’s like to be beneath, but not above. And that is what we went to work with every day...we knew that we had something special that we wanted to give the world – that we could be full human beings in the roles that we were playing. That we could create a world that exemplified a world that we wanted to see.”
Referencing the sequel to the 2018 Marvel Studios blockbuster, Boseman said, “I know you can’t have a Black Panther now without a ‘2’ on it.”
The other big winner of the night was Amazon’s web series The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, which won Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series, Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series (Rachel Brosnahan) and Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series (Tony Shalhoub).
NBC’s family drama This Is Us won Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series. The cast includes Milo Ventimiglia, Mandy Moore, Sterling K Brown, Chrissy Metz and Justin Hartley.
The other winners in the film categories were Rami Malek, who won Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role for Bohemian Rhapsody, and Glenn Close, who won best actress for The Wife.
Emily Blunt won Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role for A Quiet Place, while Mahershala Ali won the same award in the male category for The Green Book.
In television, Sandra Oh won Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series for Killing Eve while Jason Bateman won in the equivalent category for Ozark.
The award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries went to Patricia Arquette for Escape at Dannemora. Darren Criss won in the equivalent male actor category for The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.
Alan Alda, a six-time Emmy Award winner best known for his role as Army Captain Hawkeye Pierce in the war comedy series M*A*S*H, won the Lifetime Achievement Award. The actor last year revealed that he had been diagnosed with Parkison’s Disease.
