Lincoln leads Globes with 7 nominations
Steven Spielberg’s Civil War epic, Lincoln, led the Golden Globes on Thursday with seven nominations, among them best drama, best director for Spielberg and acting honours for Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field and Tommy Lee Jones.
Tied for second-place with five nominations each, including best drama are Ben Affleck’s Iran hostage-crisis thriller Argo and Quentin Tarantino’s slave-turned-bounty-hunter tale Django Unchained.
Other best-drama nomi- nees are Ang Lee’s shipwreck story Life of Pi and Kathryn Bigelow’s Osama bin Laden manhunt thriller Zero Dark Thirty.
Nominated for best musical or comedy were: the British retiree adventure The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel; the Victor Hugo musical Les Miserables; the first-love tale Moonrise Kingdom; the fishing romance Salmon Fishing in the Yemen; and the lostsoul romance Silver Linings Playbook.
Globe attention can give contenders a boost for Hollywood’s top honours, the Academy Awards, whose nominations come out Jan. 10, three days before the Globe ceremony.
The directing lineup came entirely from dramatic films, with Affleck, Bigelow, Lee, Spielberg and Tarantino all in the running.
“It’s very gratifying to get this many nominations from the HFPA for a film I worked so hard on and am so passionate about. I look forward to having fun at the Golden Globes with my cast mates and fellow nominees,” Tarantino said in a statement.
Filmmakers behind best musical or comedy nominees were shut out for director, including Tom Hooper for Les Miserables and David O. Russell for Silver Linings Playbook.
Along with Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln in Spielberg’s epic, best dramatic actor contenders are Richard Gere as a deceitful Wall Streeter in Arbitrage; John Hawkes as a polio victim trying to lose his virginity in The Sessions; Joaquin Phoenix as a Navy veteran under the sway of a cult leader in The Master; and Denzel Washington as a boozy airline pilot in Flight.
Dramatic-actress nominees are Jessica Chastain as a CIA analyst hunting Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty; Marion Cotillard as a whale biologist beset by tragedy in Rust and Bone; Helen Mirren as Alfred Hitchcock’s strong-minded wife in Hitchcock; Naomi Watts as a woman caught up in a devastating tsunami in The Impossible; and Rachel Weisz as a woman ruined by an affair in The Deep Blue Sea.
For musical or comedy actress, the lineup is Emily Blunt as a consultant for a Mideast sheik in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen; Judi Dench as a widow who retires overseas in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel; Jennifer Lawrence as young widow in a new romance in Silver Linings Playbook; Maggie Smith as an aging singer in a retirement home in Quartet; and Meryl Streep as a wife trying to save her marriage in Hope Springs.
Nominees for musical or comedy actor are Jack Black as a solicitous mortician in Bernie; Bradley Cooper as a troubled man fresh out of a mental hospital in Silver Linings Playbook; Hugh Jackman as Hugo’s long-suffering hero Jean Valjean in Les Miserables; Ewan McGregor as a British fisheries expert in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen; and Bill Murray as Franklin Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson.
Competing for supporting actor are Alan Arkin as a Hollywood producer helping a CIA operation in Argo; Leonardo DiCaprio as a cruel slave owner in Django Unchained; Philip Seymour Hoffman as a mesmerizing cult leader in The Master; Tommy Lee Jones as firebrand abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens in Lincoln; and Christoph Waltz as a genteel bounty hunter in Django Unchained.
The supporting-actress picks are Amy Adams as a cult leader’s devoted wife in The Master; Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln in Lincoln; Anne Hathaway as a mother fallen into prostitution in Les Miserables; Helen Hunt as a sexual surrogate in The Sessions; and Nicole Kidman as a trashy mistress of a death-row inmate in The Paperboy.
Kidman was a dual nominee, also in the running as best actress in a TV movie or miniseries for Hemingway & Gellhorn. Quartet star Smith also had a second nomination, for supporting actress in a TV series, miniseries or movie for Downton Abbey.
Snubbed completely was the low-budget critical darling Beasts of the Southern Wild, which won top honours at last January’s Sundance Film Festival.
Also shut out was the stripper hit Magic Mike, which had good buzz for supporting player Mat- thew McConaughey, who also earned acclaim for roles in Bernie and Killer Joe.
With three nominations, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was a surprise, since the film had virtually no awards buzz behind it.
Globe acting winners often go on to receive the same prizes at the Oscars. All four Oscar winners last season — lead performers Streep of The Iron Lady and Jean Dujardin of The Artist and supporting players Octavia Spencer of The Help and Christopher Plummer of Beginners — won Globes first.
The Globes have a spotty record predicting which films might go on to earn the best-picture prize at the Academy Awards, however.
The Globes feature two bestfilm categories, one for drama and one for musical or comedy. Last year’s Oscar best-picture winner, The Artist, preceded that honour with a Globe win for best musical or comedy.
But in the seven years before that, only one winner in the Globe best-picture categories — 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire — followed up with an Oscar best-picture win.
Along with 14 film prizes, the Globes hand out awards in 11 television categories.
The nominees for best television drama series are: Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey, Homeland and The Newsroom. And the nods for best TV comedy series are: The Big Bang Theory, Episodes, Girls, Modern Family and Smash.
Jodie Foster, a two-time Oscar and Globe winner for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs, will receive the group’s Cecil B. deMille Award for lifetime achievement at the Jan. 13 ceremony.
There will be some friendly rivalry among the hosts at the Globe ceremony, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.
Both were nominated for best actress in a TV comedy, Fey for 30 Rock and Poehler for Parks and Recreation.
Fey and Poehler follow Ricky Gervais, who was host the last three years and rubbed some Hollywood egos the wrong way with sharp wisecracks about A-list stars and the foreign press association itself.
With stars sharing drinks and dinner, the Globes have a reputation as one of Hollywood’s loose and unpredictable awards gatherings.
Winners occasionally have been off in the restroom when their names were announced, and there have been moments of onstage spontaneity such as Jack Nicholson mooning the crowd or Ving Rhames handing over his trophy to fellow nominee Jack Lemmon.