Aussie screen heavyweights in spotlight as Golden Globes kick off awards season

Margot Robbie, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette and Russell Crowe are contenders at the Golden Globe Awards, announced on Monday.

Margot Robbie in Bombshell. Image supplied.

Five Australians are going for gold in the opening event of the entertainment awards season: Margot Robbie, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette and Russell Crowe are all contenders at this year’s Golden Globe Awards, announced on Monday, Aus­tralian time.

The Globes, hosted by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association since 1944, cover both film and television, which explains the strong representation of Australian acting talent.

Robbie, with her second nomination after 2017’s I Tonya, is up for best supporting actress for Bombshell, a drama about real-life events that played out when women at Fox News accused the company’s chief, Roger Ailes, of sexual harassment.

Robbie gives a strong performance but there’s considerable competition in this category, above all from first-time nominee Jennifer Lopez (Hustlers), who is widely considered the frontrunner. The subject matter of Bombshell is also part of the narrative in The Loudest Voice, a TV series about Ailes and his role in shaping the political influence of Fox News. Crowe, who has won just one Golden Globe from six nominations, plays Ailes. Nominated for best actor in a limited series or movie made for TV, he has a good chance, although Jared Harris (Chernobyl) is also favoured.

Kidman is a Globes regular, with four wins from 13 nomin­ations. She won best actress in a TV series, drama, in 2018’s Big ­Little Lies, and is nominated again for the show’s second season.

She is up against the likes of Jennifer Aniston, who stars in The Morning Show (renamed Morning Wars in Australia) and Olivia Colman (taking over as Queen ­Elizabeth in The Crown).

Blanchett (three wins from nine nominations) is a dark horse, with a nod for best actress, musical or comedy, for Richard Linklater’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, not yet released in Australia. It’s an open field, although Awkwafina in The Farewell and Beanie Feldstein in Booksmart are considered front­runners.

Collette (five nominations, one win) has a good chance for her performance in Unbelievable, for which she’s nominated for supporting actress in a limited series or movie made for TV. She is up against some significant contenders, including Helena Bonham-Carter (Princess Margaret in Season 3 of The Crown) and Meryl Streep for Big Little Lies.

Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story leads the Globes film categories with six nominations, ahead of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Quentin Taran­tino’s Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood, with five each. In the TV categories, Chernobyl, The Crown and Unbelievable each have four nods.

The voting cohort of the HFPA is small — some 90 members — and the choices are often unpredictable. The ceremony, more ­unbuttoned than the Oscars, is ­always a talking point. The host, for the fifth time, is Ricky Gervais.