Steven Spielberg might not have overly impressed critics last year with his epic horse-and-his-boy tale, but this year, things have taken quite a different turn for the director. Spielberg’s Lincoln is the front-runner for the 2013 Golden Globe Awards with seven nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis), Best Supporting Actor (Tommy Lee Jones) and Best Screenplay.
Nevertheless, Spielberg faces some stiff competition in the Best Picture category with films such as Django Unchained, Life of Pi, Zero Dark Thirty and Argo also nominated. The directors of each of the nominated films (Quentin Tarantino, Ang Lee, Kathryn Bigelow and Ben Affleck) are also respectively nominated for the Best Director award.
And that’s not all. One of the most unique aspects of the Golden Globe Awards is their decision to present two best picture and best performance categories – the other being for musical or comedy. Perhaps to no one’s surprise, Tom Hooper’s screen adaptation of the musical Les Miserables has been given a nod here, joined by The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Moonrise Kingdom, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, and Silver Linings Playbook.
Best Actor in the drama category yielded few surprises with nods going to Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln), Joaquin Phoenix (The Master), John Hawkes (The Sessions), Denzel Washington (Flight), and perhaps most unexpected – Richard Gere for Arbitrage. Meanwhile, Jack Black (Bernie), Bradley Cooper (Silver Linings Playbook), Hugh Jackman (Les Miserables), Ewan McGregor (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen) and Bill Murray (Hyde Park on Hudson) will be fighting it out for the Best Actor award in the comedy or musical category.
Continuing the trend of nominating big names (and several previous award winners), the Best Actress Golden Globe will either be going to Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty), Marion Cotillard (Rust and Bone), Helen Mirren (Hitchcock), Naomi Watts (The Impossible) or Rachel Weisz (The Deep Blue Sea). Academy Award shoe-in for Best Actress Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook) has been nominated for Best Actress in the musical or comedy category, alongside some very familiar names including Emily Blunt (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen), Judi Dench (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), Maggie Smith (Quartet) and Meryl Streep (Hope Springs).
Few surprises were to be found in the Best Supporting Actor category with nominations going to Alan Arkin (Argo), Leonardo Dicaprio (Django Unchained), Philip Seymour Hoffman (The Master), Tommy Lee Jones (Lincoln) and Christoph Waltz (Django Unchained).
The same cannot be said for the females. While Amy Adams (The Master), Anne Hathaway (Les Miserables), Helen Hunt (The Sessions) and Sally Fields (Lincoln) were popular favourites, Nicole Kidman has appeared seemingly out of nowhere to earn herself a place in the category for her performance in The Paperboy. The only hint that Kidman might be in with a shot came after the recently announced SAG awards also recognised her with a Best Actress nomination.
There were a few upsets this year, with no nominations for Beasts of the Southern Wild, and no recognition for Les Miserables director Tom Hooper or Silver Linings Playbook director David O. Russell. Big blockbusters such as The Dark Knight Rises and Skyfall also failed to make an impression, and although Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master served its performers well, it too failed to make the Best Picture or Best Director cut.
But the talk around town is that the biggest Golden Globe snubs this year came in the television categories, with Mad Men failing to pick up a nomination for Best Television Drama – a category which now includes Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire, Downton Abbey, Homeland and The Newsroom. Parks & Recreation is thought to have been similarly snubbed in the Best Comedy or Musical category, with nominations going instead to The Big Bang Theory, Episodes, Girls, Modern Family and Smash.
A full list of all Golden Globe nominees can be found at the official site.
The winners will be announced at a ceremony on 13 January, hosted by Amy Poehler and Tina Fey – both of who are coincidentally competing against each other for the Best Actress in a comedy or musical category for their respective work in Parks & Recreation and 30 Rock.