48 hours with Streisand still wasn’t enough

The Screen Actors Guild Awards are Saturday. The Producers Guild’s honors follow on Sunday. Am I cheering for anyone? Not specifically, just an outcome or two that won’t make the Oscars (still two weeks away!) feel like a complete afterthought.

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, host of The Envelope’s Friday newsletter and the guy proud of all those UCLA alums keeping the neighborhood Village Theater open and, hopefully, thriving for at least another 93 years. Let’s look at the week’s news ...

Streisand talks SAG Awards, snubs and singing with Bob Dylan

Barbra Streisand’s 970-page memoir, “My Name Is Barbra,” took her 10 years to complete. So it didn’t seem like that much of an ask for me to spend 48 hours listening to her read it, which I did over the course of a couple months.

Exhaustive, but never exhausting, digressive, sure, but usually to fine effect, intimate and honest, Barbra — I feel like we’re on a first-name basis now that we’ve spent so much time together — made for good company. I’d listen while making dinner, making lists of what I’d heard and, by the end of it, making up for lost time because, again, 48 hours.

Streisand will receive a lifetime honor Saturday at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, another trophy for a woman who joined the EGOT club long ago. Even after that deep dive into her life, I still had questions, which Streisand was happy to answer — by email. (If you’ve read the book, you know she likes to fuss over the details.) After spending so much time focusing on her voice, it felt like a novelty to zero in on her words.

You can read our correspondence here, including a ringing endorsement of a Valley deli, why the film academy’s directors branch still feels a bit like a boy’s club and why the numbers aligned for her to get all dressed up and receive another honor this weekend.

Barbra Streisand will receive a lifetime honor at the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Saturday.

(Collier Schorr)

Ranking all the Oscar best picture years, worst to first, since the category expanded

Ever since the motion picture academy super-sized the Oscars’ best picture category up from five in 2009, there has been constant complaining about how the prestige of a nomination has been diluted, almost as if there was a collective amnesia about the scores of cringe-worthy movies that have picked up the honor over the decades.

This year, though, the grumblers went silent as Oscar voters delivered an unimpeachable best picture field, a group of 10 movies that only a self-proclaimed Scrooge could find fault with.

Is it the best group of best picture nominees we’ve had since the category was expanded? For a recent column, I decided to find out, ranking all the Oscar classes since Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” won in 2010, a year that fell near the middle of the pack. Not to get ahead of ourselves, but let’s just say that history will be kind to the class of 2023.

Jeremy Renner in “The Hurt Locker,” the first best picture winner since the Oscars expanded the category in 2009.

(Summit Entertainment)

SAG Awards looking for a Netflix bump

After years of languishing on TNT and TBS, the Screen Actors Guild Awards will be streamed live for the first time on Netflix. My colleagues Josh Rottenberg and Wendy Lee report on why the move could bring the show to a far larger audience than ever before.

“This is a milestone for what started out as the little engine that could 30 shows ago,” says actor JoBeth Williams, who serves as chair of SAG’s Awards Committee, which is charged with oversight of the show. “It’s an exciting new format for us, and it’s bringing us into what’s happening now, what the world wants to see.”

What we know so far: There will be no commercials. No orchestras playing off the winners in the middle of their acceptance speeches. And Da’Vine Joy Randolph will pick up yet another supporting prize for her affecting work as the grieving mother in “The Holdovers.” Also, as noted above: Babs will be there. What? You were planning on finishing “Love Is Blind” that night? It’ll still be there.

SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher onstage at the 2023 Screen Actors Guild Awards. The 2024 edition will be the first to stream live on Netflix.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)