SAG Awards Snub 'Sweeney,' Love Angelina Jolie

The Screen Actors Gild, the only group with a guaranteed awards show coming next month, has announced its nominations. And they are strange.

In one fell swoop, as they say, the SAG nominating committee has snubbed a number of films and actors who were on the fast track to Oscars. At the same time, the SAG voters have revived some that were completely dead or forgotten.

The biggest shocks? A total snub of Paramount’s Oscar-bound “Sweeney Todd,” and the restoration of Angelina Jolie to Best Actress in the mostly unseen and panned “Mighty Heart.”

The oddest choices? Best Ensemble cast nominations for “3:10 to Yuma,” a remake of a Western that had been just about completely buried in the rubble of small releases. Other unusual choices in that category: “Hairspray” and “American Gangster.”

Wednesday, I wouldn’t have given any of those three a shot at the Best Picture nomination for the Academy Awards.

The other two more reasonable choices by SAG: “No Country for Old Men” and “Into the Wild.”

But that leaves out other ensembles that were thought more likely to make it, including the top-seeded Oscar film “Sweeney Todd,” plus: “Juno,” “The Savages,” “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” “The Great Debaters,” “I’m Not There,” “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” and “There Will Be Blood.”

Actors whose names surprisingly don’t appear on the SAG list: Philip Seymour Hoffman, who’s got three tremendous performances this year, his “Savages” co-star Laura Linney, Paul Dano from “Blood” and any of the cast of “Sweeney Todd.”

It’s almost as if the nominators didn’t see all of the films. Or, if they did, the voters were so scattered that the finalists made it with little plurality.

Either way, the SAG Awards will now be viewed in a new light once the Academy Award nominations are made known. They’ll either have been a true predictor or a scattershot in a year when no one had the faintest idea what to do.