Black Panther took home the top prize at the 2019 Screen Actors Guild Awards.
This evening, the Marvel movie won the Best Cast Ensemble Prize, the SAG Awards’ equivalent to the Academy Awards’ Best Picture. It marked the first time in the SAG Awards’ 25-year-history that a comic book superhero movie claimed the prize.
Even more importantly, the victory positions Black Panther as a strong contender to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Over the last decade, half of SAG ensemble winners went on to claim the Oscars’ top accolade.
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In accepting the SAG award, Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman quoted Nina Simone’s classic song “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black”.
“When I think of going to work every day and the passion and the intelligence, the resolve, the discipline that everybody showed, I also think of two questions that we all have received during the course of multiple publicity runs,” Boseman remarked. “One is: Did we know that this movie was going to receive this kind of response? Meaning, was it going to make a billion dollars? Was it going to still be around during this awards season?”
“The second question is: Has it changed the industry?” he continued. “Has it actually changed the way this industry works [and] how it sees us? And my answer to that is: ‘To be young, gifted, and black.'”
Boseman ended his speech by teasing a Black Panther sequel, saying, “I know you can’t have a Black Panther now without a ‘2’ on it.”
Black Panther is one of eight films to be nominated for Best Picture at the 2019 Academy Awards, which goes down February 24th. Already, it’s made history by being the first superhero movie to be nominated in the category.
