The Artist. Photo credit: Getty Images, Weinstein Company
Bookmakers may have a difficult time with this year’s Academy Awards: No clear frontrunner has emerged from the nominations for that awards season weathervane, Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Golden Globe Awards.
Silent film The Artist bagged the most nominations for the 69th annual Golden Globes, announced on Thursday, with six; The Help, about black maids in segregated 1950s Mississippi, and The Descendants, about a Hawaiian land baron trying to reconnect with his family, followed with five noms each; and Woody Allen’s time traveling comedy Midnight in Paris scored four.
Check here for the full nominations list.
Individually, it looks like leading man George Clooney’s star can’t burn any brighter: He stars in two films nominated for Best Picture, The Descendants and political drama The Ideas of March, and is nominated for Best Actor for The Descendants and Best Director for The Ides of March, which also scored three other nominations. Brad Pitt, a longtime pal of Clooney’s, is also nominated for Best Actor for his role in Moneyball, while on the Best Actress front, relative newcomer Rooney Mara (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) faces veterans Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady) and Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin). And on the small screen, beloved British period soap opera, Downton Abbey, snagged four nominations – including a Best Supporting Actress for the wonderful Maggie Smith – as did HBO’s Mildred Pierce, starring Kate Winslet and Evan Rachel Wood.
The Golden Globes, hosted once again by the famously biting Ricky Gervais, will air on January 15, 2012.
So, what does it all mean?
The snubs. It’s not so much who was nominated as who wasn’t, claimed Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply at The New York Times’s Carpetbagger blog. “Perhaps most notable was the complete shutout of a perceived Oscar front-runner, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, a post-9/11 drama from Stephen Daldry and the producer Scott Rudin. Steven Spielberg also fared poorly, with his old-fashioned War Horse only picking up only a pair of nominations and Mr. Spielberg missing from the best director category.”
Oscars in the Globes tea leaves? “The Golden Globes are not taken seriously as artistic milestones and have a history of voting idiosyncrasies,” judged Barnes and Cieply at The New York Times, adding that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association tends to nominate “based on star wattage instead of performance in an effort to orchestrate a red-carpet spectacle” and holding up Madonna’s critically panned but well-nominated Wallis Simpson biopic W.E. as evidence. But even so, observers pour over the Golden Globe noms for some indication of which way the Oscars may go and for good reason: “The best picture Oscar has mirrored the association’s choice for best drama or best comedy-musical about two-thirds of the time over the last two decades.”
Played it straight. In the past, the Golden Globes have thrown up some curveballs – largely because the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has the Musical or Comedy slots to fill, Joal Ryan at E! Online noted. This time, however, they played things “pretty straight”, though Ryan Gosling’s nomination for Crazy Stupid Love seemed to come a bit out of left field.
More on the Golden Globes, Hollywood
- Ricky Gervais is back to host the Golden Globes, despite backlash from HFPA old-timers
- Ricky Gervais skewers Hollywood at Golden Globes
- Rooney Mara wows as Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
- J. Edgar
- Shame
