BEVERLY HILLS (California): Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s film about a Mumbai slum youth who wins the popular TV game show Kaun Banega Crorepati, has been nominated for best picture at next month’s Golden Globe Awards.
Hollywood’s annual awards season got underway on Thursday with the unveiling of nominees for the Globes. A slew of A-list talent was among the nominees named at an early morning ceremony in Beverly Hills, with Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, and Angelina Jolie all picking up nods.
Slumdog Millionaire, which stars Anil Kapoor as the game show host, Irrfan Khan, and newcomers Dev Patel and Freida Pinto, faces strong competition from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, The Reader, and Revolutionary Road.
The Globes, which take place on January 11, are seen as an important staging post ahead of the Academy Awards, offering clues to which films and stars will be successful at the Oscars. In the past four years the Globes have failed to accurately predict the best picture winner at the Academy Awards, but overall some 67% of Oscars best picture winners had first received a Golden Globe.
No one film emerged as the overwhelming favourite, with Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, and Doubt snaring five nominations each. Both Benjamin Button and Frost/Nixon cemented their status as Oscars contenders, however, with nominations for best drama, best director, and best actor.
Benjamin Button, an adaptation of an F Scott Fitzgerald short story, stars Pitt as a man who ages in reverse. Pitt’s rivals in the best actor race include DiCaprio, who plays a frustrated 1950s suburbanite in Revolutionary Road, Sean Penn, a trailblazing homosexual politician in Milk, Frank Langella, disgraced US president Richard M Nixon in Frost/Nixon, and Mickey Rourke, a washed-up brawler in The Wrestler.
In the best actress race, Angelina Jolie was nominated for her performance as a mother searching for her son in Clint Eastwood’s period drama Changeling. Other nominees were Anne Hathaway for Rachel Getting Married, Streep for her performance as a tyrannical nun in Doubt, Kristin Scott Thomas in I’ve Loved You So Long, and Kate Winslet for her role opposite DiCaprio in Revolutionary Road.
Winslet, who is yet to win a Globe despite five previous nominations, also received a nod in the best supporting actress category for her role as a former concentration camp guard in The Reader.
This year’s awards season takes place against the backdrop of a possible Hollywood actors’ strike. Last year’s Golden Globes were scaled back after actors vowed to boycott the event in solidarity with striking screenwriters. But although the Screen Actors Guild on Wednesday announced plans to hold a strike authorisation vote in early January, ballots will not be tallied until after the 2009 Globes are staged.
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