It’s all the time refreshing when a present learns from its personal errors. Whereas 2024’s SAG Awards ceremony was a mishmash of tonally dissonant scripting and segments within the present’s first yr on Netflix, 2025’s SAG Awards confirmed a marked enchancment rooted in what makes the Display screen Actors Guild tick.
The ceremony opened with a pre-taped phase that includes “Hacks” — principally bonus “Hacks” for everybody lacking the present since its spring 2024 premiere. Immediately this labored higher than the form of opening that arbitrarily forces movie and TV crossovers, as a substitute specializing in a present that is concerning the business, and a personality with a profitable efficiency profession, Deborah Vance (Jean Good).
Like the remainder of Hollywood’s awards season for the reason that Golden Globes, the SAG Awards carried the emotional weight of January’s Los Angeles wildfires, from movies devoted to L.A. on movie and the SAG-AFTRA Basis’s help for members in want, to first responders current within the viewers. It gave the ceremony two driving themes: empathy and group.
For as insular and focused as Hollywood awards exhibits are, there has all the time been the drive to discover a extensive viewers and excessive rankings. Only one week after “SNL50,” the place it “felt like the parents swept up on stage have been having far more enjoyable than these of us caught watching from the sofa,” the SAG Awards felt equally disinclined to carry out for these exterior of the establishment it celebrated.
And since SAG is a union of colleagues and never an audience-focused manufacturing like “SNL,” that ethos really infused the ceremony with a stronger voice. This reviewer loves montage, and these ones introduced it again to performing as a substitute of fixating an excessive amount of on the yr’s movies and TV (which nonetheless had loads of alternative to shine). Certain, they might have used extra depth, however the “Scream Queens” idea paid tribute to horror and the artwork of the on-screen scream, whereas the “Regulation & Order” and cleaning soap opera montages harassed the significance of being a day participant or visitor star whereas constructing a efficiency profession.
Kristen Bell dealt with her internet hosting duties with ease and allure, offering a few of the strongest interstitials in all the present; opening the present with a “Frozen” parody (“Do You Wanna Be An Actor?”), reuniting along with her costars from “The Good Place” for an ideal “Challengers” setup, dishing concerning the friends “Gossip Woman”-style with Leighton Meester, hanging out backstage with “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” costar Jason Segel, and naturally slightly Netflix synergy with “No one Desires This” costar Adam Brody (a present within the mere infancy of its awards marketing campaign!). What might be considered as flashing a resume as a substitute strengthened the present; why not play to the host’s particular strengths and connections? These segments happy followers of Bell’s intensive physique of labor whereas additionally becoming seamlessly into the remainder of the night.
As revered leaders within the room, each SAG President Fran Drescher and Life Achievement Award recipient Jane Fonda advocated for sensitivity and activism, leaving out particular political actions, events, or individuals in favor of galvanizing language about waking up, defending one another, and how one can “give a rattling about different individuals.”
For an awards ceremony largely honoring the same old suspects of the season (with welcome surprises — Martin Brief! Colin Farrell! “Conclave!”), the SAG Awards mirrored its voting physique and a shared want to degree up year-after-year — chasing greatness, within the phrases of winner Timothée Chalamet, even when there’s nonetheless room to enhance.
Grade: B-
The thirty first Annual SAG Awards are actually streaming on Netflix. Click on right here for the complete listing of nominees and winners.