Squid Game earns SAG and Golden Globes awards, disrupting Hollywood

The Display screen Actor’s Guild Awards will not be probably the most illustrious of Hollywood’s many awards —that might be the Academy Awards. However the SAG Awards occupy a particular place within the trade, as do numerous different Guild awards, just like the Director’s Guild Awards and the ACE Eddie Awards for editors. As SAG notes on its web site, “of the highest trade honors offered to actors, solely the SAG Awards are chosen solely by performers’ friends in SAG-AFTRA with 124,000 eligible voters.” Which makes Squid Recreation’s a number of SAG nominations much more spectacular.

The Netflix present garnered three nominations: Excellent Efficiency by a Male Actor, for Lee Jung-jae as Seong Gi-hun, Participant 456; Excellent Efficiency by a Feminine Actor, for Jung Ho-Yeon as Kang Sae-byeok, the North Korean Participant 067; and an general award for Excellent Efficiency by an Ensemble Collection.

Picture: Netflix

Netflix has run a large awards marketing campaign for Squid Recreation, together with pop-ups in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Paris that includes Okay-pop DJ units and possibilities to play the video games seen within the present. For an awards swag bag, Netflix gave out dalgona cookies, which viewers would possibly bear in mind being obsessively licked within the present, alongside an HD projector and noise-canceling headphones.

Netflix has been in a position to parlay non-American entities into awards for years now, from The Crown to Alfonso Curon’s Roma. However Squid Recreation poses some distinctive challenges: in contrast to The Crown, it fully depends on subtitles, and in contrast to Roma, the present operates very a lot inside a selected style of battle royale dystopias.

It’s not fully alone on the dystopia entrance as Jung Ho-Yeon is competing towards Elisabeth Moss in The Handmaiden’s Story, however Moss has been nominated and successful awards for her position as June since 2017. Squid Recreation has solely been round for one season.

Picture: Netflix

For Hwang Dong-hyuk, the present’s creator, the whole expertise of awards season has been a brand new one. “In Korea, while you create a manufacturing, you don’t actually have an awards race. Some day, any individual will name you up and say, ‘Come get your award,’” he instructed Self-importance Honest in December 2021.

He additionally cites Parasite as inspiration for his success. Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 film, an enormous success in South Korea and important favourite in the US, shocked many when Jane Fonda opened an envelope and introduced the psychological thriller as the primary non-English language film to win the Academy Award for Finest Image. The victory helped Hwang Dong-hyuk regain his confidence when restarting his famously lengthy highway to the Squid Video games’ eventual creation. Parasite’s win gave him “a extra formidable aim, pondering of not solely the native Korean market but additionally globally, and gave me hope that perhaps it might be seen all all over the world and that I ought to make or not it’s seen all over the world,” he instructed Self-importance Honest.

Whereas awards season is flawed in some ways, it stays probably the most outstanding technique of judging TV and films exterior of the strictly industrial realm of field workplace returns and hours seen. Having this approval may also help a streaming service stand out amidst the very crowded subject, which may be a part of why Netflix has such low subscriber cancellation charges. A profitable awards season may additionally push again towards the current criticism that lots of the Netflix’s reveals simply aren’t superb.

Within the 2010s, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Curon created an unprecedented second for Mexican administrators, incomes a cavalcade of awards and nominations for films like Gravity, The Form of Water, Birdman, and others. Whereas Squid Recreation has stiff competitors within the SAG Awards and no matter comes after, between the hit present and Parasite, the same second may be beginning for South Korea.