The 5th Screen Actors Guild Awards, honoring the best achievements in film and television performances for the year 1998, took place on March 7, 1999. The ceremony was held at the Shrine Exposition Center in Los Angeles, California, and was televised live by TNT.

Life Is Beautiful is a 1997 Italian comedy-drama film directed by and starring Roberto Benigni, who co-wrote the film with Vincenzo Cerami. Benigni plays Guido Orefice, a Jewish Italian bookshop owner, who employs his imagination to shield his son from the horrors of internment in a Nazi concentration camp. The film was partially inspired by the book In the End, I Beat Hitler by Rubino Romeo Salmonì and by Benigni's father, who spent two years in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II.