Golden Globe nominees announced
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - The British historical romance Atonement led the competition for the Golden Globes with seven nominations yesterday, including best drama and acting honors for Keira Knightley and James McAvoy.
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - The British historical romance
Atonement
led the competition for the Golden Globes with seven nominations yesterday, including best drama and acting honors for Keira Knightley and James McAvoy.
The foreign-policy romp
Charlie Wilson's War
, which opens nationwide next Friday, ran second to
Atonement
with five nominations. Among double nominees were Cate Blanchett, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Clint Eastwood and Eddie Vedder, who received bids for song and score - as did Eastwood.
Besides
Atonement,
the best-drama nominees for the 65th Golden Globes were the crime sagas
American Gangster,
Eastern Promises
and
No Country for Old Men
, the inspirational college drama
The Great Debaters
, the legal drama
Michael Clayton
and the California oil-boom epic
There Will Be Blood
.
Because of a tie in voting, seven dramatic nominees were picked, rather than five.
Nominated for best comedy or musical along with
Charlie Wilson's War
were the Beatles musical
Across the Universe
, the Broadway adaptation
Hairspray
, the comedy
Juno
and the bloody musical S
weeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
.
No clear favorites
No clear front-runners have yet emerged in the buildup to the Academy Awards race, so the big nominations haul could make an early favorite of
Atonement
, which just opened theatrically last week. Oscar nominations come out nine days after the Golden Globes ceremony Jan. 13. (The Oscars will be presented Feb. 24.)
Joining Knightley in the dramatic-actress category was Blanchett for her title role as the British monarch in
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
. Blanchett also had a supporting-actress nomination for her gender-bending role as an incarnation of Bob Dylan in
I'm Not There
.
Also earning two nominations was Hoffman, for lead actor in a comedy or musical in the sibling tale
The Savages
and supporting actor for
Charlie Wilson's War
.
Charlie Wilson's War
is a comic look at a congressman (Tom Hanks), a Texas socialite (Julia Roberts), and a slovenly CIA man (Hoffman) who engineered the covert U.S. response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Washington up for acting
Denzel Washington, director of
The Great Debaters
, was nominated for best dramatic actor for
American Gangster
, in which he plays a 1970s Harlem heroin baron.
Along with Washington and McAvoy, dramatic-actor nominees were George Clooney as a conscience-torn lawyer in
Michael Clayton
, Daniel Day-Lewis as an oil tycoon in early 20th-century California in
There Will Be Blood,
and Viggo Mortensen as a Russian mobster in
Eastern Promises
.
Also in the dramatic-actress category were Julie Christie as a woman succumbing to Alzheimer's in
Away From Her
, Jodie Foster as a Manhattan vigilante in
The Brave One
, and Angelina Jolie as journalist Mariane Pearl in
A Mighty Heart
.
Complicating this latest season of Hollywood backslapping is a strike by the Writers Guild of America, whose members walked off the job in November over their share of potential profits from programming distributed over the Internet.
Many awards shows are written under guild contract, so it remains unclear how the strike might affect the ceremonies, which are scheduled to be broadcast live on NBC.