They’ve been called the SAG Awards 2026 for 31 years. As of March 1, 2026, that name is gone.
The 32nd annual ceremony — held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles and streamed live on Netflix — is now officially called the Actor Awards. SAG-AFTRA said the new name was designed to give “clearer recognition in terms of what the show is about for our domestic and global audiences — we honour actors in film and television.” Kristen Bell hosted. Harrison Ford cried. The Studio walked out with multiple trophies. And Sinners and One Battle After Another made the film race one of the tightest in recent memory.
The name change was the least surprising thing that happened all night.
Harrison Ford Gets His Moment
The evening’s most emotional beat had nothing to do with competitive categories.
Harrison Ford received the SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Award — the honour the union gives to an actor whose career has left a permanent mark on the craft. Past recipients include Jane Fonda, Sally Field, Barbra Streisand, Robert De Niro, and Morgan Freeman.
Ford is 83. He has been working continuously since the 1960s. Han Solo. Indiana Jones. Jack Ryan. Rick Deckard. And for the last three years, Paul Rhodes in Shrinking — a performance that reminded an entirely new generation of viewers what Ford can do when he’s given room to actually act rather than just carry a franchise.
The room gave him a standing ovation. He was, reportedly, brief in his speech and visibly moved. No one who has followed his work for the last decade was surprised by either of those things.
The Studio Owns TV Comedy
If there was a dominant story in the television categories, it was Apple TV+’s The Studio — the comedy series created by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg about the chaos inside a Hollywood studio.
Seth Rogen won Best Actor in a Comedy Series for the show. Catherine O’Hara won Best Actress in a Comedy Series — a posthumous honour for a performance she completed before her death earlier this year. The show was nominated in five television categories and landed two of the biggest.
O’Hara’s win landed differently because of the circumstances. She spent decades as one of the most reliably brilliant comic performers in North American entertainment — Best in Show, Schitt’s Creek, and now The Studio, which gave her a late-career role that matched her range completely. The room’s reaction when her name was called was the kind of silence that turns into something louder.
Rogen, collecting his own award moments later, kept it short. He thanked O’Hara. He didn’t try to make a joke of it. That restraint was the right call.
Adolescence and Dying for Sex Split the Limited Series
The limited series categories were divided cleanly between two of the year’s most talked-about streaming projects.
Owen Cooper won Best Actor in a Limited Series for Adolescence — the Netflix four-part drama about a 13-year-old boy arrested for murder, told across four real-time episodes. Cooper’s win confirmed what most critics already felt: his performance is one of the most unsettling and technically demanding pieces of child acting in years. Stephen Graham — who co-stars and co-created the series — was also nominated in the same category, which says everything about the show’s depth.
Michelle Williams won Best Actress in a Limited Series for Dying for Sex — the Hulu series based on the real-life story of Molly Bloom, a terminal cancer patient who spent her final year pursuing sexual and personal liberation. Williams has been one of the finest dramatic actresses of her generation for twenty years. This win, from a union of peers who understand the work from the inside, sits differently than a critics’ award.
Keri Russell, Noah Wyle, and the Drama Race
In television drama, The Diplomat and The Pitt split the acting honours.
Keri Russell won Best Actress in a Drama Series for The Diplomat — the Netflix political thriller where she plays a US ambassador navigating a geopolitical crisis while her marriage quietly unravels. Russell has been exceptional in the role across two seasons. A SAG win from the actors’ own union puts her firmly in the Emmys conversation for this year.
Noah Wyle won Best Actor in a Drama Series for The Pitt — the Max medical drama set entirely in real time across a single 15-hour emergency room shift. Wyle carries nearly every scene of the show. The SAG win is the most significant recognition the series has received so far and will almost certainly accelerate its Emmy profile.
The drama ensemble category saw nominations split between The Diplomat, Landman, The Pitt, Severance, and The White Lotus — five shows with almost no overlap in tone, audience, or approach. That range says something about the current state of prestige television: it is genuinely difficult to define what a great drama series even looks like right now, because they look so different from each other.
Sinners vs. One Battle After Another — the Film Race
The film supporting categories went to Sean Penn for One Battle After Another and Amy Madigan for Weapons.
Penn’s win was a genuine surprise. He was nominated alongside Miles Caton (Sinners), Benicio Del Toro (One Battle After Another), Jacob Elordi (Frankenstein), and Paul Mescal (Hamnet) — a category stacked deep enough that any one of five names felt possible. Penn taking it for Thomas Pynchon’s adaptation is a significant signal ahead of the Oscars.
Amy Madigan’s win for Weapons was the category’s biggest upset of the night. She was up against Ariana Grande (Wicked: For Good), Teyana Taylor (One Battle After Another), Wunmi Mosaku (Sinners), and Odessa A’zion (Marty Supreme). Grande in particular had been seen as a strong contender. Madigan’s win — from actors voting for actors — speaks to the kind of performance her peers recognise more readily than general audiences do.
The Best Film Ensemble and lead acting categories were the last prizes of the evening, with One Battle After Another and Sinners locked in what The Washington Times described as “the final pre-Oscars showdown.” One Battle After Another entered the night with a record seven nominations. Sinners entered as the one film in the race that could genuinely upset it.
The Oscar race, with two weeks left, just got its last major data point.
SAG Awards 2026 Name Change Actually Means
Back to the name. It is worth saying plainly: calling them the Actor Awards instead of the SAG Awards is not just a rebrand. It is an acknowledgement that the initialism “SAG” — which stands for Screen Actors Guild — no longer means much to a global streaming audience who found these awards through Netflix, not through union politics.
The ceremony has been on Netflix for two consecutive years now. It is increasingly watched by people outside the United States who have no attachment to the union structure behind the show. For them, “the Actor Awards” is more self-explanatory than an acronym that means something specific only to American industry insiders.
The content of the ceremony hasn’t changed. The awards themselves mean the same thing — peer recognition from the largest union of professional actors in the world. The packaging is just cleaner now.
Whether people will call them the Actor Awards rather than the SAGs in casual conversation is a different question. Award show names take years to stick. The Globes are still the Globes. The Emmys are still the Emmys. Habits run deep.
But the show is better served by the new name than the old one. And last night — with Harrison Ford standing at a podium, The Studio going home with two trophies, and the Oscars two weeks away — gave the newly renamed ceremony exactly the kind of night that a relaunch deserves.
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