Oscars: Can Viola Davis beat Meryl Streep to best actress?

WITH a Golden Globe for her role as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, Meryl Streep has been the critics' and bookies' favourite to win the Oscar for best actress next month.
 
But yesterday the odds looked set to change as the maids from civil rights drama The Help swept the Screen Actors Guild awards.

• More pictures from the Screen Actors Guild Awards 2012

The 1960s story of an aspiring author writing a book about the daily hardships of African-American maids won three out of the five film awards. Viola Davis, who plays Southern domestic Aibileen Clark, beat Streep, Tilda Swinton, Michelle Williams and Glenn Close to win the award for best actress.
 
The surprise win is sure to have critics recalculating their Oscar predictions because it is actors, like those who vote in the SAG awards, who make up the biggest voting group for the Academy Awards.
 
The Help also won the outstanding cast performance and Davis's co-star Octavia Spencer won best supporting actress, beating The Artist's Bérénice Bejo, Bridesmaids' Melissa McCarthy, Albert Nobbs' Janet McTeer and her co-star Jessica Chastain.
 
The Artist, which has ten Oscar nominations, came away with just one SAG award for Jean Dujardin as best actor, while The Descendants came away with nothing.
 
The fact that The Help has a predominantly black cast is thought by some commentators to be an issue, after last year's major acting categories were described as "the whitest group of Oscar contenders" in a decade.
 
As Mariella Frostrup said in yesterday's Observer, she thinks Streep deserves best actress, but "it will most likely go Viola Davis for The Help, to make up for the lack of black actors who've won an Oscar to date".
 
The Help cast will find out if they have bagged any Academy Awards on 26 February in Beverly Hills, where they are nominated for best picture, best actress for Viola Davis and best supporting actress for co-stars Jessica Chastain and Octavia Spencer. ·