Whatever the reason, this year’s Screen Actors Guild Awards ceremony crystallized its role during awards season: it’s a semi-insular, half-sober, self-congratulatory vocational celebration that embraces the paradox of a union made visible through millionaires.  The show kicked off with a strange example of this paradox as John Cryer, Demian Bichir, Emily Watson, and Jim Parsons proclaimed “I am an actor.” They were celebrating their profession while simultaneously seeming to argue against some unseen attack on their chosen field, surrounded by opulence but implying labor solidarity.

More than anything else, that which sets the Screen Actors Guild Awards apart from its red-carpeted brethren is its union celebration, a narrative that seemed especially emphasized during this year’s ceremony. At its base, the Screen Actors Guild is a professional union with a mission to “enhance actors’ working conditions, compensation and benefits and to be a powerful, unified voice on behalf of artists’ rights.” The first half of that mission statement sometimes gets lost in the much more visible second half, but this year’s awards emphasized the Guild’s efforts for working actors (not just the stars seated in the audience) with a “note of appreciation” to all the branches of the Guild, called the SAG story. In the video presentation that played during the first half of the ceremony, brief scenes from a variety of (mainstream, Hollywood, and critically-acclaimed) movies featured local actors and the big name directors who lauded their work. Ben Affleck described his Boston actors as “so perfect and so real” and Robert Redford speaks of two Georgia actresses who were “right on” with their characters in The Conspirator. The air of authenticity hangs heavy over this segment until the final “local” actor appeared: “Mike Tyson, Las Vegas.” The implications of this apparently comedic turn are unclear but seem to speak to this idea of the SAG awards having it both ways: movie stars and labor solidarity. Admittedly, I haven’t watched the SAG awards every year, but the union themes seemed especially pronounced this year, a year in which labor unions across the country faced threats and recalled strength from solidarity. SAG even created a number of brief videos affirming their support of labor last April, one of which I’ve included below.