All You Need Is a Movie and a Dream
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

As the annual awards marathon broke into a steady trot yesterday morning with the announcement of the 2008 Golden Globe nominees, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association devised a cunning strategy to balance out the year’s obscure critical favorites with a few bona fide blockbusters: Nominate more films.
The HFPA, now in its 65th year of playing bridesmaid to the Academy Awards’s bride, selected a grand total of 12 films for best picture consideration (split into its traditional categories of drama on one side and musical or comedy on the other). No fewer than seven titles will vie for best picture in the drama category, with another five fighting it out for best musical or comedy.
The year’s usual suspects were all to be found: “No Country for Old Men” (loved by the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle), “There Will Be Blood” (trumpeted by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association), and “Juno,” which opened to critical jubilation last week.
But all frontrunners aside, the major studios must have heaved a collective sigh of relief as the nominees were read and their multimillion-dollar award-season ad campaigns finally started to generate dividends.
Blazing the trail was Joe Wright’s “Atonement,” the season’s most prominent epic period romance, which, despite starring such A-list names as Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, has received wildly mixed reviews since opening last Friday. Yesterday, “Atonement” made instant headlines with seven nominations, for best picture, director (Mr. Wright), actor (Mr. McAvoy), actress (Ms. Knightley), supporting actress (13-year-old Saoirse Ronan), screenplay (Christopher Hampton), and original score (Dario Marianelli). Critics be damned, the film was launched instantly into the middle of the Oscar conversation.
Similarly, “American Gangster,” which has been all but absent from the awards discussion thus far, burst back into the fray with nods for best picture, director (Ridley Scott), and actor (Denzel Washington, who, intriguingly, was chosen over his co-star, the perennial awards favorite Russell Crowe). As tends to happen every year with the Golden Globes — the first significant nominations to be announced by a body other than an exclusive circle of critics, with winners to be honored the evening of January 13 — yesterday’s lengthy list of nominees immediately shuffled up the awards season pecking order. Several prominent titles gained momentum, while some outcasts were brought back from the brink. Other titles, however, having struck out thus far, risk being forgotten entirely.
Notably, momentum surged around five titles that, to this point, have been overshadowed by the Coen brothers’ thriller “No Country for Old Men” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s meticulous character study “There Will Be Blood.” Chief among them was the teenage pregnancy comedy “Juno,” which is up for best picture, screenplay (first-timer Diablo Cody), and actress (the 20-year-old Ellen Page), and “Sweeney Todd,” the R-rated Tim Burton adaptation of the popular stage musical set for release December 21. “Sweeney Todd” earned nominations for best picture, director (Mr. Burton), actor (Johnny Depp), and actress (Helena Bonham Carter).
Just as frontrunner “There Will Be Blood” has yet to be seen by a general audience, the HFPA boosted anticipation for two other yet-to-be-released titles. The first, the Denzel Washington-directed, Oprah Winfrey-produced “The Great Debaters” (opening December 25), was nominated for best picture. The second, Mike Nichols’s “Charlie Wilson’s War” (opening December 21), starring Tom Hanks (remember him?), Julia Roberts, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, received nominations for best picture, actor (Mr. Hanks), supporting actor (Mr. Hoffman), and screenplay (Aaron Sorkin) after being ignored by the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Circle, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Julian Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” cemented its position as the year’s leading foreign language film, earning nominations for best director (Mr. Schnabel), screenplay (Ronald Harwood), and foreign language film.
Thanks to the manner in which the HFPA nominates films, dividing works between dramas and comedies and thereby ensuring twice as many nominees as the Oscars, the Golden Globes often help to resurrect works long thought out of the running. Such was the case with three titles yesterday, chief among them David Cronenberg’s critically hyped, little-seen mob thriller “Eastern Promises,” which was nominated for best picture, along with Julie Taymor’s Beatles musical “Across the Universe” and Adam Shankman’s whimsical take on “Hairspray” (which also surprised observers with nominations for Nikki Blonsky as best actress and John Travolta as best supporting actor).
What is often less discussed about the Golden Globe nominees, however, is the way they affect those titles clinging to the cusp, whose failure to secure a nod here might eliminate them from the discussion entirely. Surely that’s the way director Sean Penn and company must be feeling about “Into the Wild,” which, despite its multi-month engagement and Gotham Awards win for best feature, was shunned (save for a musical nomination). Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There,” one of the year’s critical sensations, was also nowhere to be found (besides Cate Blanchett’s long-expected nod for best supporting actress). Disney’s “Ratatouille” was topped by the likes of “Hairspray” for a nomination for best picture comedy, reduced to competing for best animated film against “Bee Movie” and “The Simpsons Movie.” John Carney’s ultra-indie smash hit musical “Once,” which showed for six months in New York City and raked in some $9 million in America on a budget of $150,000, was completely forgotten. So were Andrew Wagner’s “Starting Out in the Evening” and Sidney Lumet’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” both of which have been lauded as acting showcases.
One issue that was brought to light yesterday was the surprising number of acting nominees who risk splitting their votes this awards season. Mr. Hoffman, for example, who has delivered three Oscar-caliber performances this year — in “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” “The Savages,” and “Charlie Wilson’s War” — was nominated for the latter two. But much the same issue could affect Mr. Washington, for his leading performances in both “American Gangster” and “The Great Debaters”; Tommy Lee Jones for both “In The Valley of Elah” and “No Country for Old Men”; Ms. Blanchett, for both “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” and “I’m Not There,” and Casey Affleck, for both “Gone Baby Gone” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”
As a result, while the contest among the various best picture nominees will no doubt become brutal as studios fight to make the leap from one of a dozen Golden Globe nominees to one of the five Oscar finalists (to be announced January 22), so will the crowded acting races become just as intense.
ssnyder@nysun.com