Awards-season fanatics spend sleepless night after sleepless night fine-tuning our lists of predictions, obsessing over each and every pick until we’re absolutely certain that we’ve nailed down the nominees that’ll be named in each and every category. Then the bright morning of the actual nominations announcements comes and we remember, oh yeah, ain’t nobody knows nuthin’ about nuthin.’
Paradoxically enough, big surprises — some welcome, some less so — have become par for the course at the Golden Globes, Hollywood’s loosey-goosiest awards program. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association pulled its fair share of gotcha! moments during the live-stream of the nominations for the 73rd annual ceremony early this morning, with snubs, unexpected inclusions, and category swaps galore. We’ve already compiled a full and complete list of all the nominees in both the film and TV races, but that still leaves plenty to pore over and extrapolate from until the actual ceremony on Jan. 10 proves us wrong all over again.
Two key nominations strengthened the resolve of this year’s populist favorite, Mad Max: Fury Road. Awards prognosticators had begun to count the high-adrenaline blockbuster out of the major categories, and indeed, a world in which Charlize Theron receives recognition for her pared-down performance as Imperator Furiosa gets more remote with every passing day. But assumptions that the Academy’s history of leeriness toward action flicks would bar Fury Road from a Best Picture nomination were upended when the film scored a spot in the Globes’ Best Motion Picture — Drama category as well as a nod for George Miller in the director race. Knuckle-whiteners have never been the Academy’s bag, but the sheer ambition of Miller’s vision may be too much to ignore, and Fury Road has the thematic density as well as the film-school pedigree — Miller has been vocal about the influence that John Ford’s classic Westerns had on the film — to earn a Best Picture nod. Chances are that the Globe will go to the more widely accessible Spotlight or Carol, but the director prize is very much a toss-up between Miller, Carol‘s Todd Haynes, and Spotlight‘s Tom McCarthy.
One of the biggest names at the Globes this year also happens to be one of the silliest. Way back last week, the Dalton Trumbo biopic Trumbo was looking like another good-looking historical drama with little to offer beyond its eminently capable lead performance from Bryan Cranston. But just yesterday, the SAG Award nominations handed the film a trio of key nominations for Cranston, supporting actress Helen Mirren, and the entire ensemble. In doing so, they suggested that Trumbo may be more of a Ray than an Amelia (remember when Hilary Swank was a frontrunner for that one, before anyone actually saw it?), capable of going the distance all the way to Oscar night. And though Trumbo wasn’t able to land a space in the Best Picture — Drama category, both Cranston and Mirren landed individual nods. In light of today’s announcements, a couple nominations for Trumbo, if only in the acting categories, are practically assured.
There’s plenty of room for Mirren in the Supporting Actress race because her chief competitor, Rooney Mara, was rightfully bumped to Leading Actress status. The phenomenon of “category fraud” — the practice of sneaking actors or films into less-competitive categories to up their chances of scoring a nomination, regardless of whether they actually qualify for that category — has been on industry insiders’ lips all season. The Hollywood Foreign Press was not entirely immune to category fraud this year; to call The Martian a comedy is a grave diss to humor itself. But they righted a pair of injustices by placing Carol‘s Mara and Alicia Vikander’s The Danish Girl performances into the leading actress race. Both roles occupy roughly the same amount of screen time as the actors that have been labeled the leads — Cate Blanchett and Eddie Redmayne, respectively, both of whom scored nods of their own — and deserve to be regarded as such.
But however much fun it might be to get excited over surprise nominations, it’s not nearly as fun as getting outraged over our favorites who didn’t make the cut. The biggest snub of the lot went to the collected cast of Spotlight, who have traded nominations between Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, and Rachel McAdams seemingly at random, with no pattern as to who stands a real chance of emerging. The Spotlight cast was completely shut out of the acting categories, though the film itself scored a Best Picture — Drama nomination and Ruffalo got an acting nod in the comedic race for his turn as a bipolar father in Infinitely Polar Bear. And a surprise nomination for Will Smith in the still-unseen Concussion meant that a likely nominee had to get bumped out, which ended up being Johnny Depp as Black Mass‘ Bostonian gangster Whitey Bulger. For the most part, however, the Globes film categories behaved as expected.
The TV categories, however, behaved as would be expected from a straight-up crazy person. The freshman Amazon series Mozart In The Jungle had generated practically zero awards murmurs up until now, and had gone completely ignored by the Emmys, but none of that stopped it from storming the Best Series — Musical or Comedy category and winning a nomination for lead actor Gael García Bernal. Mozart was joined by fellow out-of-nowhere Hulu newcomer Casual in a category with two entries apiece from Amazon and HBO and one from Netflix. This, it bears mentioning, marks the first time that no network series has contributed a nominee to this category. And in the drama series race, only one nominee hails from the world of network TV. The winds of change blow ever-forward.
The surge from unfamiliar streaming programs meant that some Globes standards fell by the wayside, including usual suspects House of Cards and Downton Abbey, neither of which managed to snag a drama-series nomination. The old physics adage of every action having an equal and opposite reaction definitely applied to this year’s slate of nominations, where every exciting new nominee displaced an expected frontrunner. Eva Green’s sublimely Gothic turn in Penny Dreadful edged out Claire Danes for yet another Homeland nom, Rob Lowe’s agreeably smarmy performance in The Grinder ridded the Globes of the continuing scourge known as Jim Parsons and The Big Bang Theory, and in the miniseries category, the ballet drama Flesh and Bone squeezed out HBO’s vital, urgent Show Me a Hero. And apparently the HFPA wanted to nominate Narcos so badly that they figured it’d be worth it to give the final season of the televisual landmark Mad Men the cold shoulder.
Netflix had a banner year, and of course cleaned up in nearly every category, but a couple troubling exclusions merit special attention. Ellie Kemper doesn’t enjoy the cultural import that Tina Fey did at the time of 30 Rock‘s early seasons. (In a world where Sarah Palin never secured the VP nomination, 30 Rock‘s standing in the public sphere might have looked quite different.) She was unable to land a nomination for herself or the show at large. Master of None co-creator Aziz Ansari wowed voters enough to qualify for an individual nomination, but his fellow show-runner Alan Yang will be disappointed to see that the program couldn’t muscle into the race for Best Series. Both shows enjoy niche appeal, but as praise piles up and they ready their second seasons, they could grow enough to come back stronger than ever next year.
