Votes are in
Golden Globe nominations feature wide mix
Golden Globes voters nominated an unusually wide mix of movies on Monday, pulling smaller dramas like “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” deeper into the Oscar race, throwing support to Ridley Scott’s last-minute effort to erase Kevin Spacey from “All the Money in the World” and embracing diversity among the nominees.
The largest number of nominations — seven — went to Guillermo del Toro’s fantasy “The Shape of Water,” including ones for best drama, director, actress (Sally Hawkins), supporting actress (Octavia Spencer) and supporting actor (Richard Jenkins.) Close behind with six apiece were “The Post,” a Watergate-era drama about the struggles of Katharine Graham to lead The Washington Post, and “Three Billboards,” about a mother (Frances McDormand, a nominee for best actress) who pushes local authorities to investigate her daughter’s murder.
The other nominees for best drama were “Dunkirk,” Christopher Nolan’s the Second World War epic, and the gay romance “Call Me by Your Name.”
Long seen as the most unserious stop on Hollywood’s awards circuit, the Golden Globes are handed out by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a group of mostly freelance journalists, only 89 of whom vote. Studios see members as easy to manipulate, a reputation the group contends is long outdated. (A lawsuit in 2011 alleged payola and kickbacks. The organization settled out of court.)
And top prizes are split into dramatic and comedic categories, often in confounding ways. This
time around, the satirical horror film “Get Out” was nominated in the best musical or comedy category. (Its backers at Universal submitted it there, hoping to improve its chances, creating an internet brush fire last month.) “Get Out” will compete against the P.T. Barnum musical “The Greatest Showman”; the figure-skating dark comedy “I, Tonya”; the movieabout-a-movie “The Disaster Artist”; and Greta Gerwig’s coming-ofage comedic drama “Lady Bird.
But timing is everything in show business, and Academy Award voters (some 8,400) cannot help but pay attention to the Globes, which are bestowed in the middle of the Oscar nomination process. The 75th Globes ceremony will be hosted by Seth Meyers and broadcast live on NBC on Jan. 7. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce Oscar nominations Jan. 23.
The Oscar race — the first in nearly 30 years without Harvey Weinstein pulling strings — has so far been a free-for-all, with “The Post,” “Dunkirk,” “Call Me by Your Name,” “Lady Bird” and others jockeying for position.
Among television categories, “HBO’s “Big Little Lies” was the one to beat, taking six nominations, including for best limited series and all four of its actresses — Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman in the lead category and Laura Dern and Shailene Woodley in supporting.
Best drama candidates were the usual suspects: “Game of Thrones,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Stranger Things,” “This Is Us” and “The Crown.” Best comedy nominations went to “Will & Grace,” “Black-ish,” “Master of None” — all expected — and two new series: “The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel” on Amazon (the latest from the “Gilmore Girls” creator Amy Sherman-Palladino) and “SMILF,” a Showtime series that stars Frankie Shaw as a working-class single mother in Boston.
The nominations were announced by Alfre Woodard, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Bell and Sharon Stone in a pre-dawn presentation at the Beverly Hilton Hotel timed for the East Coast-based morning news shows. The press association handed out Champagne before 5 a.m. Pacific Time to toast the 75th anniversary of the awards.