Both the Producers and Screen Actors Guild awards happened this weekend, the last two stops for gas, cigarettes, and furtive defecation in a bathroom best described as “Bugonian” before the long, barren two-week journey to the Oscars. These final waystations offer us some valuable clues in predicting moviedom’s biggest prizes, so let’s take a look at what we might know now that the craziest people you went to high school with have given each other trophies. 

Well, actually, before we do that, maybe we could talk a little about Sunday night’s SAGs broadcast itself, which was on Netflix for kind of the third time (fourth if you count the year Netflix livestreamed them on their YouTube channel, an evening that shall live in janky-audio infamy). It’s only been a few years, but that is still time to practice, which probably means that Netflix’s show shouldn’t be… an abject technical nightmare? There is something distinctly off about Netflix’s efforts to replicate what broadcast television has been doing for a century. (Televised awards shows, I mean; the SAGs are a lot younger than that.) And yet that off-ness is a little hard to articulate. 

Some things are obvious. The teleprompter seemed to be moving very slowly, thus causing myriad presenters to stumble over their lines, awkwardly waiting for the next hideous joke to come rolling onto the screen like a bagel plopping out of a deli toaster. The interstitial bits involving host Kristen Bell were stilted and seemingly under-rehearsed. (No one in the booth seemed to know when to turn the mics on and when to turn them off.) And the shots of presenters were strangely framed, particularly those of the film ensembles presenting their nominated movie. Those were shot from a way low angle, as if the cameraperson was lying on the ground asleep but fortunately crumpled in such a position that the camera was at least sort of pointed up toward the stage. 

Why would you film anyone that way, let alone actors? Was the camera team this year assembled by trawling Tompkins Square Park and rounding up ten NYU first-year photography students snapping Dutch-angled pictures of unhoused people? (A ritual one used to observe every fall and spring in the East Village, before the NYU students all decamped for places unknown.) It was an ugly, unflattering mess—and no, honey, I’m not talking about Demi Moore’s dress, ahaaa! 

That was the tangible stuff that was bad. But there was something ineffable, too. These streamed awards shows just can’t quite capture the live-ness of the experience somehow; the ambient hum of life is missing. I know this was just the SAG awards (which are still called the SAG awards and will never be called anything else), and that ceremony has never exactly been a Daryl Zanuck production. But I’m pretty sure I remember it feeling a bit slicker and frankly more real on TNT. It’s entirely possible that this is just some inherent bias, that I am reacting to the SAGs differently simply because I know they’re on Netflix now, but watching them feels as if there’s a ghost in the machine making things weird and uncanny. 

I guess this is something I’m going to have to get used to now that the Academy Awards are set to stream on YouTube in just a few years and, of course, the VMAs will soon be projected onto the side of Bari Weiss’s head during a debate titled “Are My Wife and I the Only Good Gay People?” But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. I miss the crackle and texture of something sent out over the old-fashioned airwaves, past the dirigibles and gyrocopters clogging up the night sky as they make their way from Idlewild to Roosevelt Field. 

Anyway, while the broadcast was terrible, that doesn’t mean the awards themselves were! I’m not going to talk about the TV awards here because who on God’s gangrenous earth could possibly care about those.  Let’s instead turn to the movie prizes, which were given out to films as far ranging as the horror film Sinners to the horror film Weapons and, of course, the horror film Hamnet. (What, you don’t think a child dying of the plague is horrifying? Okay.) I think we may have gained some clarity about what’s going to happen at the Oscars come March 15.