The Hollywood Foreign Press Association made its selections for the 2007 Golden Globes today, picking 12 Best Picture nominees instead of its usual slate of five apiece in the bifurcated Best Drama and Best Comedy/Musical categories. Director Joe Wright’s Atonement led the honored films with seven nominations, including best acting honors for Keira Knightley and James McAvoy.
Alongside Atonement in the Best Drama category for the 65th annual Golden Globes were the crime sagas American Gangster, Eastern Promises and No Country for Old Men, Denzel Washington’s inspirational college drama The Great Debaters, the legal drama Michael Clayton and writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s California oil-boom epic There Will Be Blood. Nominated for Best Comedy/Musical, meanwhile, were the Beatles musical Across the Universe, the foreign-policy romp Charlie Wilson’s War, the period piece Broadway adaptation Hairspray, the idiosyncratic teen-pregnancy comedy Juno and Tim Burton’s bloody adaptation of the throat-slitting musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Surprising omissions in the Comedy/Musical category were two films in which man-of-the-moment Judd Apatow had a hand — Knocked Up and Superbad, each of which were significant box office hits that also came with a critical embrace.
Nominated actress performances were comprised of the aforementioned Knightley, Angelina Jolie for A Mighty Heart, Jodie Foster for The Brave One, Julie Christie for Away From Her and Cate Blanchett for Elizabeth: The Golden Age in the Drama category. In the Comedy/Musical category, the nominees were: Amy Adams for Enchanted, Nikki Blonsky for Hairspray, Helena Bonham Carter for her work opposite Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd, Marion Cotillard for her work as Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose and Ellen Page (Hard Candy) for her breakthrough performance in Juno.
Nominated actors in the Best Drama category included George Clooney, Denzel Washington, Daniel Day-Lewis, James McAvoy and Viggo Mortensen, all for performances in nominated films. Getting unfortunately hosed was Frank Langella, whose performance as a tightly coiled intellectual anchors the impressive indie Starting Out in the Evening. In the Comedy/Musical category, Johnny Depp, Tom Hanks, Ryan Gosling (Lars and the Real Girl), Philip Seymour Hoffman (The Savages) and John C. Reilly (Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) comprised the nominee slate. For a complete list of other nominations, click here.
If there’s one thing the Hollywood Foreign Press wants us all to take away from 2007, it’s that it was a banner year for dramas. How else to explain the magnificent seven nominees, Brent? You claim it’s to pad the invite list in the hopes at least some of those actors will cross the supposed picket lines to attend. But that’s ridiculous, as there’s free alcohol and why wouldn’t an actor attend an event where they’re giving away booze? The only answer therefore is that the mighty Hollywood gods have wrought seven outstanding exemplars of dramatic cinema and thus we should not be forced to arbitrarily assign value to only five of them. On a more “glass is half empty” side, it’s also very clear to the rest of Hollywood — only 7 are worthy drama films in 2007 for had there been more they could have been accommodated. Maybe this is the Foreign Press saying, “Ugh — there’s only these worth discussing and the rest (we’re looking at you, Michael Bay) aren’t worth mentioning again.” Gosh… maybe it wasn’t such a banner year after all.