Golden Globe Nominations: Battle after Battle Leads the Charge | Golden Globe

Nowadays, Paul Thomas Anderson’s rack remains remarkably light on major prizes. Despite being responsible for some films widely recognized as the best of the century so far, including There Will Be Blood, The Master, and The Phantom Thread, the writer-director has yet to win an Oscar, a Golden Globe, or more than a BAFTA (original screenplay for 2021’s Licorice Pizza).

This year’s Golden Globe nominations suggest that’s about to change, as his counterculture epic Battle After Battle leads the pack of nominees with nine nods on the shortlist, including Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Leading Actor for Leonardo DiCaprio, Leading Actor for Chase Infiniti, Supporting Actress for Teyana Taylor and two supporting actor slots – for Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro. Jonny Greenwood’s score was also recognised.

Anderson, 55, has been here before, of course — he already has 11 Oscar nominations, one of the highest for someone yet to win — and yet the season so far suggests that “Battle After Battle,” in which DiCaprio plays a freedom fighter taking on a white supremacist in Pennsylvania, is the film to beat. Last week it won both the Gotham and New York Film Critics Circle Awards, while on Sunday it also won the Los Angeles Film Critics Society Awards.

The film that seems best at managing surprise is Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s Mississippi-set ghost thriller that reunites him with Fruitvale Station and Creed star Michael B. Jordan, and was a box office hit when it opened last spring. Sinners received seven Globe Award nominations, including Best Drama and Best Director and Actor. Coogler made history in 2018, when his Marvel film, Black Panther, grossed $1.3 billion — the highest grossing film directed by an African-American man — and became the first superhero film to be nominated for Best Picture.

No black director has yet won a Golden Globe or Academy Award for Best Director, although several — including Steve McQueen and Barry Jenkins — have directed films that have won Best Picture.

Both Sinners and One Battle After Another were produced by studio Warner Bros., and are now the subject of a proposed purchase from Netflix. Although no deal is likely to be completed by mid-January, when the Globes are held, if completed by March 15, it would boost the streaming company’s chances of securing its first best picture win.

Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value performed much better than expected, with eight nominations including Best Actress for Renate Rensef, Supporting Actress for both Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning, Supporting Male Actor for Stellan Skarsgård, as well as recognition for the film’s original screenplay and direction.

It is one of six contenders for Best Non-English Language Feature, including It Was Just an Accident by Iranian director Jafar Panahi. The Palme d’Or winner was nominated by France for the award because its director – whose prison experiences inspired the film – is no longer popular with his country’s government, which last week sentenced him to another year in prison. His film is also nominated for Best Drama, Best Screenplay and Best Director.

The good performances of both films, as well as Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice” and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent” — each of which received three nominations — are a testament to the Globe Awards’ global rise and a year at the movies that was relatively weak for Hollywood’s critical successes while non-English-language films flourished.

Wagner Moura’s nomination for Best Actor in a Drama, for The Secret Agent, makes him the first Brazilian to compete in this category, while actors such as Brendan Fraser (Rental Family) and Robert Pattinson (Die My Love) were excluded. Australian Joel Edgerton was among the nominees for the critically acclaimed Train Dreams award.

Other notable critics include Kathryn Bigelow, whose nuclear thriller House of Dynamite failed to receive a single nomination despite an enthusiastic reception at the Venice Film Festival; Alex Garland’s War; and the critically acclaimed Taiwanese film “Left Hand Girl,” written and directed by Tzu Shih-ching, a long-term collaborator of Sean Baker, whose film “Anora” swept the Oscars earlier this year.

Sydney Sweeney’s committed performance as boxer Christy Martin also failed to translate into an expected nomination, while Bradley Cooper’s stand-up comedy Is This a Thing in the Works? He also failed to put any names in the hat.

A number of nominees also received just one nomination for their stars, including Song Song Blue (Kate Hudson), the Springsteen biopic Rescue Me From Nowhere (Jeremy Allen White), the Shaker story The Will of Anne Lee (Amanda Seyfried), Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt (Julia Roberts), and Lynne Ramsay’s Death of My Love (Jennifer Lawrence).

There was also some confusion among critics as to how Superman (gross: $616 million) failed to get a nod as a cinematic and box office hit, while KPop Demon Hunters — which was released on Netflix with a brief single release — did.

Meanwhile, Hamnet, an adaptation of Chloe Zhao’s Maggie O’Farrell novel, received six nominations for best drama and director as well as adapted screenplay and nods for its stars Jesse Buckley and Paul Mescal. In 2021, Zhao became the second woman ever to win the Best Director Oscar for Nomadland.

There were several Australian names on the list as well as Edgerton. Jacob Elordi is nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role as the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and for Best Actor in a Television Miniseries for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, an adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s award-winning novel. Sarah Snook is nominated for Best Actress in a Miniseries for the thriller All Her Fault, and Rose Byrne is nominated for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.

Slightly lower-than-expected score was Marty Supreme, director Josh Safdie’s crazy story about a table tennis player played by Timothée Chalamet, and is nominated for three awards: lead actor in a comedy or musical, original screenplay and director. Gwyneth Paltrow missed out on the supporting actress nomination for a performance that many saw as a career resurgence.

Chalamet, who turns 30 later this month, is considered by many to have been last season’s runner-up in the best actor race, where his turn as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown lost every award except a Screen Actors Guild Award to Adrien Brody of The Brutalist.

With Wicked: For Good, Jon M. Cho bests the four nominations he received last year for the first film, earning five nods, including Best Motion Picture Comedy or Musical, Best Actress for Cynthia Erivo and Best Supporting Actress for Ariana Grande. Erivo’s nod makes her the first Black woman to be nominated twice in the category.

This year’s TV nominations were dominated by HBO/Sky’s compelling drama The White Lotus, and Netflix’s gritty series Adolescent, which received six and five nominations, respectively.

Stephen Graham, Ashley Walters, Owen Cooper and Erin Doherty are up for acting awards for Adolescent, while the series will compete with All Her Fault, The Beast in Me, Black Mirror, Dying for Sex and The Girlfriend for best limited series.

Meanwhile, The White Lotus earned nominations for Walton Goggins, Jason Isaacs, Carrie Coon, Parker Posey, and Emmy Lou Wood, as well as Outstanding Drama Series.

Previously announced Lifetime Achievement Award winners Helen Mirren and Sarah Jessica Parker will receive the Cecil B. DeMille and Carol Burnett Awards, respectively, at a ceremony on January 8.

The Brutalist and Emilia Perez won Best Picture last year in the Drama and Musical/Comedy categories respectively, while Brody, Demi Moore, Fernanda Torres and Sebastian Stan took home the lead acting awards. The event was hosted by Nikki Glaser, who returns for this year’s event on January 11. Oscar nominations are revealed on January 22, ahead of the awards ceremony on March 15.