LOS ANGELES-British stars are well represented in this year’s Golden Globe nominations, with Rocketman’sTaronEgerton and Phoebe Waller-Bridge up for awards.
Waller-Bridge is up for a lead actress prize for Fleabag, while her Irish co-star Andrew Scott is also nominated.
Marriage Story, a Netflix production, is the most nominated film, having received six citations in all.
The Irishman, another Netflix film, and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, have five nominations each. The Crown, Chernobyl and US crime thriller Unbelievable lead the way on the TV side of things, having received four nominations apiece.
Tarantino’s film is up for best musical or comedy, alongside Nazi satire Jojo Rabbit, murder mystery Knives Out, Elton John biopic Rocketman and comic biopic Dolemite Is My Name.
Scorsese, Mendes and Tarantino are up for the best film director award, with Joker’s Todd Phillips and Parasite’s Bong Jong Ho completing the all-male line-up.
The South Korean film-maker is also up for best screenplay for Parasite - a dark comedy about his homeland’s social divides that is also up for best foreign language film. Netflix has been throwing huge amounts of cash at both making and marketing its awards hopefuls this year. With that kind of spending, the streamer will be hoping for not just a good, but a great return on its investment. At this stage of awards season, it potentially looks like it might pay off.
The film with the most nominations is Netflix’s Marriage Story, starring Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, which has six. Just behind with five, another Netflix production - Martin Scorsese’s epic The Irishman starring Oscar winners Robert de Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino.
It’s still early days though. Last year, the Dick Cheney biopic Vice led the way with six Globe nominations and went on to win a grand total of one Academy Award (for make-up and hairstyling). Still, for the last few years, the eventual best picture winner at the Oscars has come from one of the films with either the most or almost the most nominations at the Globes.
The Globes’ real power comes less from those who decides on the winners but rather from its position in awards season. While it may from time to time make some unusual choices, it gives some films the chance to build momentum at the crucial time when Oscar voters are deciding not only which films to vote for, but just as importantly, which films they’ll actually make time to see.