2021 SAG Awards Will Be Pre-Taped, Hour-Long Special

BY SCOTTIE KNOLLIN

With the Emmys and Golden Globes opting for a hybrid format including Zoom acceptance speeches and live snafus, the Screen Actors Guild is taking a different approach to its annual awards, according to an exclusive report by Variety.

Executive producers Todd Milliner, Sean Hayes, and Kathy Connell confirmed that April’s ceremony will be a pre-taped television special limited to a one-hour runtime. The pre-taped special will include revealing the award winners. This will be an awards season first in modern history as this means the winners will be known to more than just the ceremony’s accountants prior to the ceremony’s airing.

The producers also revealed that going this route will opt for more organized use of the ceremony’s time and that the ceremony will still include traditional elements like the ‘I Am An Actor’ and ‘In Memoriam’ segments.

To pull off the ceremony, nominees for each category will meet in their own Zoom room, where the winner will be announced and the acceptance speech recorded. To combat information regarding category winners from being leaked, Connell said, “We hope they respect the show enough and everybody does, and their fellow actors, that they don’t want to disappoint the audience at home by letting any surprises go.”

For the ‘I Am An Actor’ segment and presenter segments, small two-person crews will be sent to each performer’s home. For performers currently in production quarantine bubbles, laptops and Zoom will be used.

Actors like Sterling K. Brown, Lily Collins, Daveed Diggs, Ted Danson, and Mary Steenburgen have already been announced as participants in the upcoming ceremony.

The SAG Awards will take place Sunday, April 4, at 8:00 p.m. CT on TNT and TBS.