Black Panther won Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture at this year’s Screen Actors Guild Awards last night.
Screen Actors Guild awards are generally considered one of the most reliable bellwethers of the Academy Awards. “Black Panther” beat “A Star is Born,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Crazy Rich Asians” and “BlacKkKlansman” to receive the award for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture.
The film stars Chadwick Boseman, Danai Gurira, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Angela Bassett, Winston Duke, and more. Black Panther is the first superhero film to win the prize.
When accepting the award, Boseman says the film has changed what it means to be “young, gifted and black”.
“To be young, gifted and black, we all know what it’s like to be told that there is not a place for you to be featured. Yet you are young, gifted and black,” he told the audience. “We know what it’s like to be told there’s not a screen for you to be featured on, a stage for you to be featured on, we know what it’s like to be the tail and not the head. We know what it’s like to be beneath, and not above. And that is what we went to work with every day.”
“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 continued. “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 added. “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.’”
