And it continued this week with the announcement of the nominations for two of the bigger precursors, the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Golden Globes. The Golden Globes are of course one of the biggest barometers for eventual nominations and possible Oscar wins.
But let's go first to the Broadcast Film Critics, and the announcement of their nominees earlier this past week. Pretty much all familiar names here, with About Schmidt, Adaptation, and The Hours leading the pack of nominations. Each film received four nominations a piece, including Best Picture nominations for each. Coming in with three nominations apiece were: Catch Me If You Can, Chicago, Gangs of New York and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, the first time we've seen the second Lord of the Rings film really place in one of these precursor awards. It's also the first time we're seeing accolades for Steven Spielberg's 2002 films, with the nominations for the yet-to-be-released Catch Me If You Can. Far From Heaven is up for Best Picture, but only received one other nomination, for Best Actress-Julianne Moore, which is pretty much expected by now. But that still was not a great showing, and did give that film some slippage, especially after what happened at the Golden Globe nominations.
But we did see Paul Newman's name for the first time among the usual suspects, and here's the list of the nominees for the Broadcast Film Critics Awards ... (I also like how the Broadcast Critics award a prize for Best Digital Performance, showing her pervasive digital characters have become. Is there any doubt which character will win this prize? We've heard so many good things about the character of Gollum in The Two Towers that he'll likely whoop up on old Yoda, unless everyone just remembers how brilliant that final lightsaber duel was!
