The Golden Globe Awards: An in-depth look at nominations

Let's uncork a bottle of champagne in runescape gold the face of the Golden Globes, the Kathie Lee Gifford of awards shows. What other trophy trolley would lurch between a high-falutin British period piece starring Colin Firth as a stuttering King George VI and a Lifetime movie featuring Jennifer Love Hewitt as a Texas beauty queen who selflessly turns to prostitution to support her family?
It's a side-swipe of culture, grazing the best of 2010: It's the Golden Globes! Johnny Depp had such an amazing year that the squirrelly Hollywood Foreign Press Association nominated him twice. Twice!
Quick: Name the two movies.
Exactly.
"The King's Speech," the one with the tongue-tied monarch, snagged seven Globe nominations Tuesday morning, just ahead of Facebook creation myth "The Social Network" and lacerating boxing drama "The Fighter," which scored six each. The psychological ballet thriller "Black Swan" and the confounding sci-fi epic "Inception" rounded out the nominees for best motion picture drama.
The entire main cast of "The Fighter" was nominated, including Mark Wahlberg for best actor in a drama and Christian Bale, Amy Adams and Melissa Leo in the supporting actor categories, which runescape money are divided by gender but not genre. Such is the way of the Globes, which also honor television but officially kick off the season of film-awards excess, when stars shower each other with praise and Hollywood conspires with the media to promote films regardless of quality.
Is this awards show only about publicity and a lavish dinner, or is there a whiff of actual merit to a nomination? Melissa Leo, who plays Wahlberg's hard-bitten mother, thinks it's both.
"The more people hear about it, the more [butts] we get in seats," says Leo, feisty as always, by phone. "As for the Hollywood Foreign Press, I've met several of them. They are a very particular, fussy bunch of people, and I'm hugely honored to recognized by them."
The nominees for best motion musical or comedy are a less acclaimed bunch: Tim Burton's bilious, CGI-drenched "Alice in Wonderland," the showgirly Cher comeback vehicle "Burlesque," the elders-with-guns action flick "Red" and "The Tourist," the umpteenth espionage potboiler starring a dangerous sexy couple - in this case Depp and Angelina Jolie, who were both nominated for their performances as an American traveling in Italy and a mystery woman who enchants him.
The out-of-nowhere nomination for "Red" probably won't jump-start an Oscar campaign, admits its producer, Lorenzo di Bonaventura. It just means that it'll boost box-office runescape accounts receipts in regions where "Red" has yet to open.
Members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association "were at our junket, and all of us have known all those guys for a while," di Bonaventura says. "If you've been in Hollywood for a while, you've seen them. . . . Filmmakers enjoy them because they come from a very simple sort of laudatory place instead of what the critics will often do to us."
In terms of critical approval, the sole gem in the comedy or musical category is the family dramedy "The Kids Are All Right," which also won nominations for best actress in a comedy or musical for its stars, Julianne Moore and Annette Bening, who play partners whose children seek their sperm-donor father.
Firth was nominated alongside Wahlberg, who portrays real-life welterweight "Irish" Micky Ward, Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in "The Social Network," Oscar co-host James Franco as an adventurer who must amputate his own forearm in "127 Hours" and Ryan Gosling in the boozy marital drama "Blue Valentine," which initially earned an NC-17 rating.
The best drama actress category teems with glamorous veterans whose presence at the dinner will be attractive to viewers (of which there were 17 million last year): Halle Berry as a woman with disassociative identity disorder in the Canadian film "Frankie and Alice," Nicole Kidman as a grieving mother in the film adaptation of the stage play "Rabbit Hole," Natalie Portman as an unhinged ballerina in "Black Swan" and Michelle Williams as the other half of the tumultuous marriage in "Blue Valentine." The sole newcomer in the runescape money category is Jennifer Lawrence, who plays a fearless 17-year-old hunting for her drug-dealing father in the Sundance favorite "Winter's Bone."
Portman's onscreen rival, Mila Kunis, was nominated for best supporting actress and says it's "strange" to be starting her first trip down the awards-season gantlet (never mind her 10 Teen Choice Award nominations). Back-patting and gladhanding are part of the filmmaking process, she realizes, and she hopes to navigate it without being overexposed or seeming repetitive.
But does the nomination have merit, in terms of talent recognition?
"It's hard for me to answer without sounding like [a jerk]," she says. "I can't say that I'm not honored that the Hollywood Foreign Press acknowledged me, but I'm more honored they acknowledged the film. I guess there are certain times where films should or shouldn't get nominated, but that shouldn't take away from the credibility of the good films that are nominated."
Joining Depp in the category of best actor in a comedy or musical are Depp himself, name-checked again for "Alice in Wonderland," Paul Giamatti in "Barney's Version," Jake Gyllenhaal in "Love and Other Drugs" and Kevin Spacey as Jack Abramoff in "Casino Jack." Joining Bening, Moore and Jolie in the race for best actress in a comedy or musical are Oscar co-host Anne Hathaway in "Love and Other Drugs" and Emma Stone in "Easy A."
Telegenic B-list triptych Blair Underwood, Josh Duhamel and Katie Holmes announced the nominations at the Beverly Hilton Hotel at the crack of dawn.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is an exclusive, oft-maligned group ff14 gil made up of about 90 journalists who write about film for readerships in such remote locales as Latvia, Malaysia and Tahiti. The association, despite instituting some ethics reforms in recent years, has never been able to shake its reputation as a star-worshiping bunch with shaky journalism credentials and an appetite for studios' PR perks.
"One thing that can't be bought is a Golden Globe - officially," Ricky Gervais said, wavering his hand in jest, while hosting the show last January. The audience of nominees and execs exploded in complicit laughter. This, after Gervais used the podium to blatantly peddle the DVDs of his movie "The Invention of Lying" and the British version of "The Office."
Historically, the telecast earns hundreds of thousands of dollars for NBC and, according to past IRS documents, millions for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Nevertheless, the telecast is often more freewheeling than the perennially staid Academy Awards - due perhaps to the Globes' dinner-style seating, the cascading champagne, the mingling of marquee film stars with second-tier TV players, and the devil-may-care consensus that the awards don't have much value beyond publicity and volatility.
The baubles will be conferred during a live NBC telecast on Jan. 16 at the Beverly Hilton, with Gervais returning as host. A win there provides momentum but hardly a guarantee for Oscar victory. Last year, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association bestowed its top honors on "Avatar" and its director, James Cameron, while the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences - a more expansive group, with 5,000 or so members practicing actual cinematic trades - gave Oscars to "The Hurt Locker" and its director, Kathryn Bigelow.
There is no overlap between Hollywood Foreign Press voters and Academy voters, though the four actors who won Oscars in March also won corresponding Globes in January. A best-picture Golden Globe has translated into a best-picture Oscar five times in the past 10 years.
"The King's Speech" and "The Social Network" are the current front-runners for this year's best-picture Oscar, according to people who have devoted their lives buy ffxiv gil to predicting such things. The Academy Awards will be broadcast live on Feb. 27 on ABC.