Strictly mainstream
Last week’s Golden Globe nominations saw birdman soaring and angelina Jolie snubbed.
THE Golden Globes can be known for its outliers and outlandish choices. But when the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced nominations for its annual prizes on Thursday, the group went solidly with the awards mainstream, as films such as Boyhood, Birdman, The Imitation Game, and Selma all solidified their spots atop the seasonal heap.
Birdman, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s dark comedy about a washed-up actor (Michael Keaton) who tries to stage a Broadway play, topped the list with seven nominations, aided in part by its placement in the less crowded comedy categories.
Determined by about 90 international correspondents, the Golden Globes are far less reflective of Oscar voters than various Hollywood guilds, whose members also often vote for Oscars. Still, the attention that a Golden Globe nomination brings can spur forward an awards campaign, as it could for Selma, while omissions can stop momentum dead in its tracks, as with Unbroken, the Angelina Jolie-directed World War II drama that received no nominations.
The Globes will be hosted by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler from the Beverly Hilton on Jan 11.
Among the other big victors on Thursday was Richard Linklater’s front-running Boyhood – a story about a young man coming of age that was shot over 12 years – which was nominated for five awards, including motion picture-drama and director. The movie has been on a magic-carpet ride since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival 11 months ago, landing atop critics’ lists and defying expectations about production and narrative in the process.
“We’ve gotten so conditioned by what we’re supposed to like, and we’ve been told what we’re supposed to like,” said star Patricia Arquette, who received a nomination for supporting actress.
“So it’s been so beautiful to see this movie and audiences say, ‘ You don’t really know what we like, guys. We like more than you think we like.’”
The Imitation Game, Morten Tyldum’s tale of the WWII codebreaker Alan Turing, also scored five nominations, while Ava
birdman, DuVernay’s civil rights drama Selma, which had been shut out of the short list of the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Wednesday, rebounded Thursday with four nominations. Those slots included picture, director and actor-drama for David Oyelowo’s turn in the film as the Rev Martin Luther King Jr.
On the other end of the spectrum, the announcements seemed to provide crushing blows to the awards hopes for Christopher Nolan’s science-fiction epic Interstellar and Clint Eastwood’s Iraq war tale American Sniper, in addition to Unbroken, which all entered the season with high hopes but were shut out of major awards on Thursday ( Interstellar did land an original score nomination).
By far the biggest surprise was the omission of HFPA favourite Jolie, who in the past has been nominated for critically panned work such as The Tourist. She also failed to land a slot for her turn as a conflicted fairytale character in Maleficent.
Julianne Moore, meanwhile, continued her steamroll through the season, landing an actress-drama nod for her turn as an Alzheimer’s patient in Still Alice, and even picking up a second nomination, as actress in a comedy, for her turn as a performer with emotional problems in David Cronenberg’s Maps To The Stars. If she were to win in both categories, she’d become only the fourth actress to win two Globes in the same day.
The announcements also provided a boost to Gone Girl, which landed a slot in Best Director, lending studio Fox hope that the movie can also land a spot on the Oscar list. — Los Angeles Times/Tribune News Service