Kieran Culkin wins Best Supporting Actor at SAG Awards — and shows up to claim it this time
Huge Oscar favorite Kieran Culkin won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actor on Sunday for his performance as the spirited but tortured Benji Kaplan in Jesse Eisenberg's seriocomic buddy pic A Real Pain. Far less predictable was the fact Culkin showed up to accept the honor, unlike at BAFTA, Critics Choice, and the Independent Spirit Awards (which took place the day before the SAG Awards).
When he claimed his statuette in person recently, Culkin tended to be a bit on the free-associative side. For example, at the Golden Globes in January, his speech included the following: "My wife and I did this shot of tequila with Mario Lopez. ... Definitely feelin' that. Whole speech is gone. Rip it, Kieran" and "Couple quick thank-yous and then I'll piss off."
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At the National Board of Review gala where the perpetually offbeat actor again won in January, he began his speech by spitting out his gum and handing it to Real Pain director and costar Eisenberg, who was standing beside him onstage. He then proceeded to talk about flying a red eye to get to the show and having ingested coffee and whiskey and napping and of this all contributing to his bad breath — hence the need for the gum. "And so I went to the bathroom and there's the bathroom attendant, which is like totally, that shouldn't exist anymore. It's freaking weird, right. There's a guy that's there that you give money to so you can pee. It's f--king weird. And I gave him money for the gum, which wasn't open, and he gave me a toothpick to open it with..."
And on it went.
What would Kieran say this time? He began his acceptance by commenting, stream-of-consciousness style, about the weight of the trophy itself. "Thank you, SAG-AFTRA, for this incredibly heavy award," Culkin said. "I don't think anyone could hold this for 45 seconds — which is the allotted time, Adrien Brody. ... There was no reason to take that shot. I love you. It's a joke. You take your time because I will because I didn't think of anything."
Naturally, the man was just getting warmed up.
"All right, moving on, I see the clock ticking. Moving on. I've got to say something here. Believe it or not, this actually means a lot to me. It's hard to be sincere after that, or in general." Indeed, sincerity is not Culkin's strong suit, which is the very definition of his considerable charm. "But hey, it's a huge honor. Thirteen, 12, 11 ... I haven't said anything. I do want to talk about one actor. Five seconds. Jesse Eisenberg. He's a great actor and a great director. He cast me in this movie without auditioning me or seeing my work in anything. He cast me because his sister told him to. I want to thank his sister Hallie for thinking of me and putting my name in her stupid brother's ear."
The speech concluded with a series of rapid-fire thank-yous, punctuated by his wife Jazz Charton's "for giving me my favorite people in the world." Culkin also thanked his mother.
To be sure, Culkin is poised to run the awards season table. In addition to his televised precursors sweep heading into the Oscars, he also won in December with the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and New York Film Critics Circle.
But besides his dominant success, the thing that's been particularly noteworthy with Culkin has been his charmingly removed I-can't-take-any-of-this-seriously attitude. If his speech didn't make it clear, he treats awards as a bit of a joke and a curiosity. To say he isn't a prominent campaigner would be a significant understatement. But it hasn't seemed to have had much of an impact on his level of success. He'd much rather hang with his wife and kids than with his film industry contemporaries.
During his acceptance speech on behalf of Culkin at BAFTA, Eisenberg — who had also won himself for Best Screenplay — took a moment to explain why his costar couldn't attend: "Kieran would love to be here. We spoke this morning. He's in New York with a family member who's quite sick. And he is so devoted as a family dad that he tried to drop out of my movie two weeks before we started shooting because he didn't want to leave his kids. ... He is one of these lucky people who's brilliantly talented, but who, for some random luck of the cosmos, has his priorities in order."
It would undoubtedly have been shocking if anyone other than Culkin had won at SAG, even more so should he fail to take home the Academy Award on March 2. In the 30 years that the Screen Actors Guild Awards have existed, the SAG winner for film supporting actor has copped the Academy Award 21 times — already not a bad percentage. However, the two ceremonies have matched up considerably more recently in the category lockstep: eight years in a row and nine times in the past 10 years. The only time the SAG winner in the category has failed to win the Oscar over the past decade came in 2016 when Idris Elba triumphed at SAG for Beasts of No Nation while Mark Rylance was victorious on Oscar night for Bridge of Spies (in a field that did not include Elba, who the Academy snubbed). The SAG winner has missed only twice for Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars in 17 years, the other time being in 2013.
Over the last five years, the supporting actor victors who have doubled up at the SAG Awards and Oscars are Brad Pitt (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah), Troy Kotsur (CODA), Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All at Once), and last year Robert Downey Jr. (Oppenheimer).
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