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The Screen Actors Guild nominations for the best of 2025 are in. And for awards prognosticators speculating on what the Oscars will do next, this is a big one. After all, the acting branch remains the largest bloc of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and there is plenty of crossover between Oscar voters and SAG membership. So while the two bodies aren’t identical, when it comes to selecting what are deemed the most worthy performances of the year, SAG is a crucial bellwether.
… And according to that bellwether, none of the best performances of the year occurred in a foreign language.
The eyebrow-raising omission comes with plenty of splashy news about who made the cut. The most-anticipated frontrunners are all accounted for in the lead categories: Timothée Chalamet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael B. Jordan, and Ethan Hawke will all be vying for Best Actor; and Jessie Buckley, Rose Byrne, Chase Infiniti, and Emma Stone for Best Actress. Meanwhile most of whatwe predicted last week to be the Best Picture frontrunners accounted for SAG’s short-list of five nominees in the Outstanding Performance By a Cast in a Motion Picture (the guild’s version of Best Picture): One Battle After Another, Hamnet, Sinners, and Marty Supreme.
In fact, the only film we considered a likely frontrunner to not round out SAG’s top five is also the one entirely shut out of SAG nominations altogether, Joachim Trier’s exquisitely beautiful Sentimental Value. While the Norwegian film has recently earned Best Picture nods from the Critics Choice Awards and Golden Globes, as have all four of its core performances—Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and Elle Fanning—none of the above were nominated by the Screen Actors Guild. Similarly, Wagner Moura, who also earned CCA and Golden Globe nominations for his work in the Brazilian film, The Secret Agent, plus a win for Best Actor at the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle, was likewise snubbed by SAG.
In their absence, a few surprises slipped through the cracks, including Kate Hudson being nominated for Best Actress for her musical turn in Song Sung Blue, Jesse Plemons getting a nod for his unnerving lead work in Bugonia, and fan favorite turns by Odessa A’zion in Marty Supreme and Wunmi Mosaku in Sinners earning surprise nominations in Best Supporting Actress. Additionally Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein slipped into the Best Cast (picture) race for the fifth slot.
The complete shutout of foreign-language films is somewhat surprising, particularly in the case of Sentimental Value which features a respected American performer in Fanning, who has received two Best Actress nominations from SAG for her work on the TV series The Great. Furthermore, Skarsgård is no anomaly to the guild either and his film sees large portions of its story shot in English (hence Fanning’s participation). The movie has in fact been a perceived awards frontrunner ever since Trier picked up the Grand Prix prize earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival.
But here’s the thing: while the Academy’s tastes have increasingly broadened over the last decade to include international cinema, particularly if it becomes the toast of Cannes, SAG remains noticeably insular with its focus on American film production.
The most striking example of the Academy broadening its voting pool in this decade is Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite winning Best Picture in early 2020, yet the shift has been going strong for almost 10 years now. Since the beginning of this decade alone, we’ve seen four of the previous five Palme d’Or winners out of Cannes wind up nominated for Best Picture (Parasite, Triangle of Sadness, Anatomy of a Fall, and Anora, the last of which was admittedly the rare American film to win Cannes’ top prize). Moreover, Sandra Hüller was nominated for Best Actress for searing work in Anatomy of a Fall, as was Penelope Cruz for the Spanish Parallel Mothers. Best Director has also long proven a fruitful category for international perspective, with the likes of Alfonso Cuarón’s work in Roma and Paweł Pawlikowski’s in Cold War being nominated in the same year.
In a nutshell, the Academy’s tastes are broadening by virtue of having a larger share of members from outside the U.S. be invited into the fold. But SAG has remained slower to adapt. Consider, for instance, Anatomy of a Fall being snubbed by the guild for Best Cast and Best Actress in 2024 (in their place was likely the cast of The Color Purple and, perhaps more happily for pop culture enthusiasts, Margot Robbie via Barbie). Similarly, Cruz was snubbed for Parallel Mothers in the year that Lady Gaga and Jennifer Hudson were nominated for House of Gucci and Respect, respectively, while films like Drive My Car, Triangle of Sadness, and Roma were completely ignored. We will point out that SAG did, however, select Parasite for Outstanding Cast in 2020.
All of which might be to say that while SAG snubbed Moura and the actors of Sentimental Value, their chances for Oscar nominations did not end today. Viewing any of them as a potential dark horse candidate capable of winning their category just became a lot harder though.
Full film nominees below.
Cast Ensemble in a Motion Picture
Frankenstein (Netflix)
Hamnet (Focus Features)
Marty Supreme (A24)
One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.)
Sinners (Warner Bros.)
Male Actor in a Leading Role
Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme (A24)
Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.)
Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon (Sony Pictures Classics)
Michael B. Jordan, Sinners (Warner Bros.)
Jesse Plemons, Bugonia (Focus Features)
Female Actor in a Leading Role
Jessie Buckley, Hamnet (Focus Features)
Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (A24)
Kate Hudson, Song Sung Blue (Focus Features)
Chase Infiniti, One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.)
Emma Stone, Bugonia (Focus Features)
Male Actor in a Supporting Role
Miles Caton, Sinners (Warner Bros.)
Benicio Del Toro, One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.)
Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein (Netflix)
Paul Mescal, Hamnet (Focus Features)
Sean Penn, One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.)
Female Actor in a Supporting Role
Odessa A’zion, Marty Supreme (A24)
Ariana Grande, Wicked: For Good (Universal Pictures)
Amy Madigan, Weapons (Warner Bros.)
Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners (Warner Bros.)
Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.)
Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture
F1 (Apple Original Films/Warner Bros.)
Frankenstein (Netflix)
Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning (Paramount Pictures)
One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.)
Sinners (Warner Bros.)
The 32nd SAG Awards are on March 1 while the 98th Academy will air on March 15.
The post SAG Nominee Snubs Reveal Continued Bias Against Non-English Movies in Oscar Race appeared first on Den of Geek.
