The SAGs represented the final stop on the Big Little Lies award tour. And this year’s Nicole Kidman award season tour. She could very well be at the Oscars as a presenter, sure, but in terms of going into an award show as a favourite for her performance as Celeste in BLL, she’s completed the run. And she swept the run, winning at the Emmys, the Globes, Critics Choice, and now the SAGs. If they could, they would give her a Grammy for it. Now we wait for BLL season 2 and whether or not the awards boards will be as generous. 

Being that it was her last opportunity to be receiving an award as Celeste though, well, this was the dress for it, wasn’t it? For me it was the best dress of the night. And it continues her streak of being the best dressed at the SAGs. Because you remember last year it was the two parrots and green sequins, a dress I will defend to the last day. 

But how often do you see a brown dress on the red carpet? Sometimes a dude might show up in a brown suit (what’s up, Ryan Gosling?) but a brown dress is rare. And a brown dress this spectacular, I can’t remember one. I do, however, remember this dress on Anne Hathaway at the Golden Globes in 2011…

….which for a long time has been the brown-ish tone standard. That dress was Armani Prive. And Nicole’s is also Armani Prive which explains why they definitely feel like they’re from the same family. But now that we’ve seen Nicole’s, Anne’s is almost a cheat, with the blush hues underneath hers. Nicole fully leans into the brown. There is no mistaking that it’s brown. And it’s such a rich and decadent brown I cannot take my eyes off of it. 

Nicole’s last acceptance speech on this victory tour was about opportunity. She’s been shooting a new movie and she’s had the flu but she wanted everyone to know how grateful she is to be able, at this point in her life, she said, now that she’s in her 50s, to be doing her best work. Because before, in Hollywood, women were no longer “viable” after 40. I like this word, “viable”. I like her choice to use it because viability is often associated with finance. And she zoned in on that too. It’s not just that women were seen as not “desirable” anymore after a certain age, it’s also that for a long time, the prevailing fallacy was that women’s stories weren’t commercially attractive. As she and her cohort have been proving, this is bullsh-t. She took her time, her last time, on that stage to drive this point home.