Saturn Awards: Spider-Man Star Tom Holland Wins For Third Year In A Row
UPDATING The 45th Saturn Awards are underway now at Avalon Hollywood in Los Angeles, honoring the b..
UPDATING
The 45th Saturn Awards are underway now at Avalon Hollywood in Los Angeles, honoring the best of science fiction fantasy, horror, and superhero sagas from film, television, streaming, home entertainment, and the local stage.
Avengers: Endgame , which now reigns as the highest-grossing film in Hollywood history, led the night in nominations with fourteen and actors from Marvel Studios productions took home plenty of galas gleaming hardware.
Robert Downey Jr.s swan song performance as Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, in Endgame earned him the best actor in a film award. (Downey will be seen in the role of Stark one more time, however, in the Marvel prequel Black Widow in May 2020.) Josh Brolin, who portrayed the calculating, grape-colored alien despot called Thanos in Avengers: Endgame, won as best supporting actor in film.
Actress and singer Zendaya won the prize for best actress in a film for portrayal of MJ in Spider-Man: Far From Home, the collaborative production from Columbia Pictures and Marvel Studios. The star of the same film, 23-year-old Tom Holland, won the award for best performance by a younger actor in a film. Its the third consecutive year that Holland has won the prize for his portrayal of Peter Parker, an unprecedented streak in any Saturn Awards category.
Game of Thrones led all television shows with nine nominations and its cast also dominated. Emilia Clarke, who portrayed Daenerys Targaryen on the HBO series, won the best television actress award. Peter Dinklage won best supporting actor on television for his role as Tyrion Lannister, besting a field of nominees that included his on-screen brother, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. The prize for best younger actor on television went to Maisie Williams, who portrayed Ayra Stark, the girl warrior of destiny on the fantasy series based on the books of George R.R. Martin.
Danai Gurira defied the Westeros domination by claiming the award for best supporting actress on a television series for her work as Michonne on AMCs venerable horror series The Walking Dead. Three Game of Thrones cast members were nominated in the category.
The CW series Supergirl flew off with the award for best superhero series. Six of the seven nominated series this year were adaptations of DC Comics characters and five of them (Arrow, Black Lightning, Supergirl, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow) air on CW (the sixth DC-based franchise was Gotham, the Fox series that ended after its 100th episode and a five-season run). The only non-DC entry in the category: Cloak & Dagger on Freeform, which adapts the adventures of the Marvel Comics duo.
A Quiet Place won for best horror film release and also for best screenplay, the latter award going to the writing team of Bryan Woods and Scott Beck as well as director and star John Krasinski. Another horror hit, Us, earned Jordan Peele the award for best director, a category that included esteemed nominees such as Steven Spielberg, the Russo Brothers, James Wan, and Guy Ritchie.
The Pixar hit Toy Story 4 won for best fantasy film, topping a nominee field that was wide enough to include fare as varied as Dumbo, Yesterday, and Godzilla: King of Monsters.
Spielbergs Ready Player One won in the best science fiction film, a category that included a number of other high-profile films deemed disappointing in other forums, including Alita: Battle Angel and Solo: A Star Wars. The Paramount spy hit Mission: Impossible – Fallout was named best action or adventure film. Mandy, the darkly surreal Nicolas Cage revenge film, took the award for best independent film.
The award for the best science fiction television series went to Westworld, the HBO series created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy that explores the dark possibilities of artificial intelligence, the evolution of sin, and the ethics of synthetic life. The categorys nominees nod to the breadth of sci-fi today with eight nominees representing seven different broadcast outlets: HBO, SyFy, Starz, NBC, BBC America, Fox, and (with two) the CW.
The sci-fi and fantasy offerings are perhaps even more impressive on streaming platforms and in that category the winner was Star Trek: Discovery, the CBS All Access show that carries on the legacy of the Starfleet universe that was created by Gene Roddenberry and dates back to the 1966 premiere of the original Star Trek series on NBC. The Federation series won against stiff competition, sharing a category with critically acclaimed franchises including The Expanse, Russian Doll, Black Mirror, and Jack Ryan.