Statistics show Black Panther's SAG Awards win gives it a 50/50 chance at the Oscars
Screen Actors Guild ensemble winners have gone on to win the Best Picture Oscar almost half the time
Black Panther's odds of winning the Best Picture Oscar have shot up after its triumph at the SAG Awards – one of the major indicators of Academy Awards success.
Across the 25-year history of the Screen Actors Guild Awards, nearly half, 48%, of films that took home the gong for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture – as Black Panther did on Sunday – have gone on to win Best Picture at the Oscars.
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Movies which have taken home the SAG Award followed by the Oscar include Shakespeare in Love, American Beauty, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Crash, No Country for Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire, The King's Speech, Argo, Spotlight and Birdman.
Black Panther initially had a slow start to the awards season, missing out on all three of its Golden Globes nominations.
But Marvel fans were delighted when it became the first superhero movie ever to be nominated at the Academy Awards – and this SAG win will now make it a frontrunner in the Oscars race.
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The Best Picture winner at the Academy Awards has usually at least been nominated for the SAG award, which is also good news for Oscar-nominated movies BlacKkKlansman, Bohemian Rhapsody, and A Star is Born – which all lost out to Black Panther on Sunday evening.
Since the SAG's ensemble award was launched in 1995, the only exceptions to that rule have been that first year (when Braveheart wasn't even nominated for the SAG Award but won the Oscar) and last year (when The Shape of Water overcame its SAG omission to win the Oscar).
But while the SAG ensemble award is seen as one of the most reliable bellwethers of the Academy Awards, with 11 out of 23 past winners going on to scoop up the Best Picture Oscar, it's still all to play for.
Several of this year's Oscar Best Picture nominees – including The Favourite, Vice and Roma – didn't even land a best ensemble nomination at the SAG Awards, but are still top contenders in the 2019 Oscars race.
In awards season, nothing is guaranteed...
