Kidman, Robbie, Jackman lead Australia’s Golden Globes charge
Some of Australia’s leading stars are in line for Golden Globes success as the Cold War-era fairytale The Shape of Water claims seven nominations.
Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape Of Water and the HBO series Big Little Lies lead the nominations for the 75th Golden Globes, which were announced today by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Del Toro’s romantic fantasy received seven nominations and Big Little Lies, based on the novel by Australian author Liane Moriarty, received six.
There were several Australians among the nominees, including Nicole Kidman, who was nominated for best actress in a limited series in Big Little Lies, where she is competing against co-star Reese Witherspoon. Big Little Lies also received acting nods for Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley and Alexander Skarsgard, in supporting roles.
Margot Robbie is nominated for best actress, comedy or musical for her performance as disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding in I, Tonya, and Hugh Jackman is up for best actor, comedy or musical, for his role as P.T. Barnum in The Greatest Showman.
Geoffrey Rush received a nod for his performance as Einstein in the TV series Genius. Jane Campion’s Top Of The Lake: China Girl, which won four awards at Australia’s AACTA Awards last week, is a contender in the limited series TV category, up against Big Little Lies.
Among the movies, Ridley Scott’s just-completed All The Money In The World is nominated in three categories, including a nod for best supporting actor in a drama for Christopher Plummer. After production wrapped, Plummer took part in reshoots, replacing Kevin Spacey in the role of J Paul Getty. This followed following a series of allegations of sexual misconduct against Spacey. Scott was nominated for best director and Michelle Williams for best actress.
Other movies to be singled out with multiple nods are Steven Spielberg’s 1970s newspaper drama The Post and Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, starring Frances McDormand as a woman who takes an unorthodox step to push for a renewed investigation into her daughter’s murder. Both received six nominations.
There were no women nominated for direction. Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird has four nods, including best film, comedy or musical. Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name also has four nominations, including best film, drama and stars Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer are up for best actor and supporting actor. But he is omitted from the best director category in the drama division.
Jordan Peele’s satirical horror Get Out was nominated for best film, comedy or musical, but Peele missed out on a directing nod. Its star, Daniel Kaluuya, was nominated for best actor. Daniel Day Lewis is nominated for best actor, drama for the period movie Phantom Thread, but writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson is not in contention, and it is not up for best film.
After Big Little Lies, the TV shows with the most nods were The Handmaid’s Tale and This is Us, with three each.
David Lynch’s return to TV with Twin Peaks was acknowledged in one category: Kyle McLachlan received a nod for best actor in a limited series.
Along with The Shape of Water, Three Billboards and The Post, the nominees for best drama were the tender young romance Call Me By Your Name (which also landed nods for stars Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer) and Christopher Nolan’s World War II epic Dunkirk. But setting itself apart from the pack was the monster fable The Shape of Water, which stars Sally Hawkins as a mute cleaning woman who falls in love with a captive amphibious creature. No film was more widely celebrated, with nods including del Toro’s directing and Alexandre Desplat’s sumptuous score. “I believe in magic and this is a magical thing,” said Hawkins. The best picture comedy or musical category was led by a handful of Oscar favourites — Greta Gerwig’s mother-daughter tale Lady Bird, Jordan Peele’s horror sensation Get Out — as well as a handful of others: James Franco’s comedy The Disaster Artist, about the making of The Room; the upcoming musical The Greatest Showman; and I, Tonya. Despite considerable backlash, Get Out ended up on the comedy side of the Globes after being submitted that way by Universal Pictures. (The HFPA ultimately decides genre classification.) Peele himself slyly commented on the controversy, calling his social critique of latent racism “a documentary”. The Globes passed over Peele’s script, but newcomer Daniel Kaluuya was nominated for best actor in a comedy.
Though some predicted and feared an acting field lacking diversity, the nominees were fairly inclusive. Among the 30 film acting nominees were Denzel Washington (Roman J. Israel, Esq.), Mary J. Blige (Mudbound), Hong Chau (Downsizing) and Octavia Spencer (The Shape of Water).
But the best director category remained all-male, as it has for most of Globes and Academy Awards history. Many hoped for a different story in a year where a parade of sexual harassment scandals has laid bare Hollywood’s gender imbalances. But contenders like Gerwig (whose film garnered four nominations, including nods for star Saoirse Ronan, supporting actress Laurie Metcalf and Gerwig’s screenplay), Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman) and Dee Rees (Mudbound) were overlooked for a group of Spielberg, del Toro, Nolan, McDonagh and Scott. Apart from the success of All the Money in the World, the morning’s biggest surprise might have been the complete omission of the romantic comedy The Big Sick, penned by real-life couple Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon. Another Oscar underdog, The Florida Project emerged with only one nomination, for Willem Dafoe’s supporting performance as the manager of a low-rent motel. In the television categories, the Emmy-winning Big Little Lies earned a host of acting nods (Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley, Alexander Skarsgard, Laura Dern) as well as best limited series. HBO, which recently announced a second season for Big Little Lies led TV networks with 12 nominations overall; Netflix followed with nine nods.
FX’s Bette Davis and Joan Crawford chronicle Feud: Bette and Joan landed four nominations, including nods for Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon. Amazon’s just- debuted The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel scored two nods, including best comedy series. Also with multiple nominations were Netflix’s Stranger Things, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale and NBC’s This Is Us. HBO’s Game of Thrones received a nod for best drama series, but nothing for its cast.
Gary Oldman, nominated for best actor for his Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour said the sexual misconduct scandals have cast an unusual pall over an awards season where Weinstein was for decades a dominant force. “How should we celebrate? Well, I don’t think any of it’s funny, so I guess that people will stay away from it in the ceremony,” said Oldman by phone Monday. “It’s evolution, and it’s good that we sort of start to check ourselves about what we do and what we say and how we do it and how we say it to people, so I think it’s ultimately a good thing. But I can’t see too much of this coming up in (the show).” The Globes haven’t traditionally predicted the Oscars, but they did last January. The Globes best-picture winners — Moonlight and La La Land — both ultimately ended up on the stage for the final award of the Oscars, with Moonlight emerging victorious only after the infamous envelope flub. The press association, which has worked in recent years to curtail its reputation for odd choices, is composed of approximately 90 freelance international journalists. Foreign film nominees were Angelina Jolie’s First They Killed My Father (Cambodia), the transgender drama A Fantastic Woman (Chile), the Germany- France production In the Fade the Russian drama Loveless and the Palme d’Or-winning The Square. The last Globes broadcast, hosted by Jimmy Fallon, averaged 20 million viewers, an upswing of 8 per cent, according to Nielsen.
The winners will be announced on January 8, 2018, Australian time, in a ceremony hosted by Seth Meyers.
With AP
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