Gary Oldman is the Oscars Best Actor frontrunner following SAG win

Gary Oldman picked up the SAG (Screen Actors Guild) award for best actor on Sunday for his performance as Churchill in Darkest Hour – and is now odds-on favourite to secure his first Oscar. The SAG award follows wins at the Golden Globes and the Critics’ Choice Movie award.

This year’s Academy Awards may not be entirely clear cut – with a head-to-head race slowly forming between Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri and The Shape of Water – but there’s one category that seems a safe bet.

Oldman’s closet competitor is likely Timothée Chalamet, nominated for Call Me By Your Name, though his appearance in Lady Bird has also helped boost his standing in the awards conversation. Also nominated at the SAG Awards were James Franco for The Disaster Artist, Daniel Kaluuya for Get Out and Denzel Washington for Roman J. Israel, Esq.

“Thank you for this tremendous honour,” Oldman opened with in his acceptance speech. “I’m honestly and truly thrilled and overjoyed to be in this room tonight, not only with my amazing fellow nominees, but my friends and peers. There are giants of acting in this room tonight.”

“Two of them share my table, Geoffrey Rush and Richard Jenkins. Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, and, of course, the extraordinary, my old sparring partner Denzel Washington.”

“They are telling me to wrap up, and that very sad music seems to follow me everywhere, so I will just say that Winston Churchill reminds us that we make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we have given.”

The SAG Awards also saw major wins for Three Billboards, with Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, alongside the entire ensemble cast picking up awards, while Allison Janney secured her position as the Oscar frontrunner for Best Supporting Actress with her win for I, Tonya.

You can read the full list of winners here.

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