Hollywood to Announce Globe Nominations

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – It’s no secret that the nomination choices for the Golden Globes have helped define the field of Academy Awards contenders. This year, a fairly wide-open awards season has yet to produce clear front-runners.

Hollywood’s uncertain awards picture will take on sharper focus when the nominations for the 62nd annual Golden Globes are announced Monday morning.

Golden Globes are handed out by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a comparatively small group of about 90 reporters for overseas news outlets. Yet with a nationally televised awards ceremony on NBC and a solid knack for picking eventual Academy Awards winners, the Globes wield a fair amount of sway among the 5,800 Oscar voters.

The Globes last January correctly predicted eventual Oscar winners in all key categories, including best-picture champ “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” and actors Sean Penn, Charlize Theron, Tim Robbins and Renee Zellweger.

But this year, as with the 2003 season – when the Oscars were moved up a month to late February – the Globes will have a bit less influence because of a tighter awards time frame.

Globe winners used to be announced a few days before Oscar nomination ballots were due. That gave last-minute voters in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences a chance to make their choices based on the Globe outcomes.

This time, Oscar nominations are due a day before the Jan. 16 presentation of the Globes. The Academy Awards show is Feb. 27.

Lead Golden Globe contenders this year include Martin Scorsese’s epic Howard Hughes film biography “The Aviator”; Clint Eastwood’s boxing drama “Million Dollar Baby”; Marc Forster’s “Finding Neverland,” about J.M. Barrie and the creation of “Peter Pan”; Joel Schumacher’s musical “The Phantom of the Opera,” adapted from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage sensation; Alexander Payne’s road-trip comedy “Sideways” and Bill Condon’s “Kinsey,” about sexuality researcher Alfred Kinsey.

Among top acting prospects were Jamie Foxx as singer Ray Charles in “Ray”; Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes in “The Aviator”; Hilary Swank as a female boxer and Eastwood as her trainer in “Million Dollar Baby”; Johnny Depp as Barrie and Kate Winslet as his muse in “Finding Neverland”; Liam Neeson in the title role in “Kinsey”; Imelda Staunton as the title character in the abortion drama “Vera Drake” and Paul Giamatti as a loser in love in “Sideways.”

The Globes feature 13 categories for film and 11 for television. Unlike other major movie awards, the Globes have separate divisions for dramas and comedies or musicals in the best-picture and lead-acting categories.

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Golden Globes: http://www.hfpa.org