Robert De Niro has once again been snubbed at a key Oscars precursor, putting his chances of a best actor win in doubt.
The nominations for the 2020 Screen Actors Guild Awards were announced Wednesday, and in the lead actor category, De Niro was surprisingly not nominated for his performance in The Irishman. That's not a great sign considering the winner of the best actor award at the Oscars is almost always at least nominated in this equivalent category the SAG awards.
Instead, the nominees for the SAG best actor prize this year are Christian Bale for Ford v Ferrari, Leonardo DiCaprio for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Adam Driver for Marriage Story, Taron Egerton for Rocketman, and Joaquin Phoenix for Joker. DiCaprio, Driver, and Phoenix were all widely expected to get nominations, though Egerton's nod for some came as a surprise.
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De Niro will be honored by SAG with a Life Achievement Award this year, however, and The Irishman itself earned a nomination for best cast, so Gold Derby wonders if "perhaps voters thought he'd be duly rewarded there."
Still, this snub comes after De Niro was also conspicuously left out in the cold at the Golden Globe Awards, where Bale, DiCaprio, Driver, Egerton, and Phoenix all received nominations, although in separate fields since the Golden Globes divides its awards into drama and musical or comedy categories.
De Niro isn't the only actor whose Oscars prospects are looking worse this week than last, with Uncut Gems' Adam Sandler also getting snubbed at both the Golden Globes and the SAG Awards, while Dolemite Is My Name's Eddie Murphy got nominated at the Golden Globes but missed at the SAG Awards.
After these two snubs, when it comes to picking up an Oscar nomination let alone a win, The Washington Post's Thomas Floyd observes it seems De Niro now "faces an uphill climb."
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