Globes Make Their Nods, as Oscar Awaits

Let the games begin.

At 5:25 Thursday morning, the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. announced the nominations for the Golden Globe Awards, bestowing the most nominations--six apiece--on Ron Howard’s psychological thriller “A Beautiful Mind” and Baz Luhrmann’s psychedelic romance “Moulin Rouge”.

Ever since NBC began televising the Golden Globe Awards show in the mid-’90s, the Golden Globes have been viewed in Hollywood as the Oscar pre-game, more important than any critics’ awards in determining how studios will craft their Oscar campaigns and what independent films might break open to wider audiences.

This is the one time of year that Hollywood really pays attention to the pronouncements of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., a little-known group of 90 journalists representing such publications as Canada’s Flare, Italy’s L’Espresso and France’s Le Figaro. Their choices will gain added importance this year because the Oscar race is perceived as being wide open. Moreover, the Golden Globes double the celebrity quotient of the televised event--NBC paid $2.4 million last year for the broadcast rights--by nominating films and actors for dramas and comedies, and throwing in awards for TV as well.

The films nominated for best picture drama include the studio films “A Beautiful Mind,” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” and the independents “In the Bedroom,” “The Man Who Wasn’t There” and “Mulholland Dr.” The films nominated for best picture musical or comedy are “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “Gosford Park”, “Legally Blonde,” “Moulin Rouge” and the computer-animated “Shrek.”

The nominations fuel speculation that such expensive studio juggernauts as “Lord of the Rings,” “A Beautiful Mind” and “Moulin Rouge” will emerge as early Oscar contenders, alongside such indie favorites as “In the Bedroom,” “Mulholland Dr.” and “Gosford Park”.

For an independent film, without major advertising support, a nomination often provides a crucial lifeline.

“It’s free advertising”, says director Robert Altman, who earned his fourth Golden Globe nomination for “Gosford Park”, an English murder mystery with comic overtones. “I hope my nomination helps this film. We have a grown-up film. It’s hard to get people to see these kinds of films, so it’s important to draw attention to it.”

For “A Beautiful Mind”, the nomination helps build awareness for a film that hasn’t even ventured into the marketplace--it opens today nationwide.

“I’m never about being happy but I am about being relieved,” says “Beautiful Mind” producer Brian Grazer, who was so nervous about the Globe nominations, “I went to Hawaii to disengage from the anxiety I was going to face. I had to get to another time zone. This is a hard movie to market and this sort of critical validation is important to its wide release in January. We needed it.”

The award is gravy for the team from “Moulin Rouge,” which has already spent the last six months traipsing the globe preaching the “Moulin Rouge” gospel.

“I never thought the film was risky. It’s what cinema’s for, really-- to make people feel,” said star Ewan McGregor, who was nominated for best actor in a musical or comedy. “In ‘Moulin Rouge,’ the audience is asked to feel a whole range of emotions. It’s about love, beauty and truth, and I think people respond to it.”

“I’m surprised and thrilled,” said Nicole Kidman, a double nominee as best actress for “Moulin Rouge” and “The Others” (in the drama category) said in a statement. “I’m really excited for Ewan and Baz and proud there are so many Aussies on the list.”

“The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” nomination, along with one for the film’s director Peter Jackson, suggested that in the AOL Time Warner intramural match-up between dueling fantasy films--”Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”--that directorial vision and heroics has gained the upper hand, at least when it comes to awards. “Harry Potter” may have Quidditch, but no Globe nominations.

Director Jackson, a first-time nominee for “Lord of the Rings,” said that after six years of making the “Rings” trilogy, it was rewarding to get recognition for the first movie. “I’ve got no real idea how it will translate it into other awards, but I do like that the Hollywood Foreign Press recognized a fantasy movie, which is a genre that doesn’t usually get recognized.”

Among the films that that didn’t fare that well in the Globes: “Ali,” which only received three nominations, including one for the film’s star Will Smith; and “Black Hawk Down,” a war film, which was shut out. The films, both of which come out next week, could have used the marketing shot in the arm that the Globes provide.

In the best acting categories, Globe nominations for Denzel Washington (“Training Day,”), Russell Crowe (“A Beautiful Mind”), Gene Hackman (“The Royal Tenenbaums”), Halle Berry (“Monster’s Ball”) and Tilda Swinton (“A Deep End”) are likely to add to Oscar talk for these stars.

A number of actors were nominated twice: Kidman, Billy Bob Thornton (“The Man Who Wasn’t There” and “Bandits”) and Ben Kingsley (“Sexy Beast” and “Anne Frank”).

“It feels great,” said Thornton. “You can’t deny it. You can say, ‘Who cares?’ I don’t think about it when I’m making a movie, but when the award time starts and people start talking about them, it’s on your mind. This is a huge honor, and you should appreciate it.”

“I don’t think I’ve been more stretched,” said Kingsley about his two nominated turns. “These guys cannot be more different. Otto Frank is the greatest father, and Don Logan is a psychopathic screaming child. That’s what I mean by acting. We don’t change. I don’t do some method acting. I worked really hard at creating these portraits.”

The nominations also portend reevaluations of several careers.

“She is just so different from the kind of character that people imagine for me,” said Sissy Spacek, nominated for her performance as a grieving mother in “In the Bedroom.” “She’s just a real grown-up. That anger is not something I’m known for.

“It feels really weird,” says John Cameron Mitchell, who was nominated for his lively turn as the botched transsexual singer Hedwig, in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” “Seven years ago I was doing this character at birthday parties. Now it’s being recognized by this international group.”

Marisa Tomei, who was nominated for best supporting actress in “In the Bedroom,” dismissed characterizations of the nomination as a sign of her “comeback.” Tomei won the best supporting actress Oscar in 1992 for her role in “My Cousin Vinny.”

“Today’s, like, a really good day, and I’m very, very happy people are going to be noticing this film, so anything that will bring attention to the movie I’m really pleased with,” she said. “I put my heart into everything I do, and I don’t try to judge it.”

For others, such as actor Hugh Jackman (“Kate & Leopold”) and Reese Witherspoon (“Legally Blonde”) the Globe nominations were indications that they were on the cusp of even bigger stardom. “I love the feminine, girly person who had ambition and drive,” Witherspoon noted, sounding not unlike the character she played in the film.

Although conventional wisdom suggests that the Globes are a good predictor for the Oscar, in truth, the track record is mixed, particularly in the acting categories. In the last decade, both organizations crowned “Titanic,” “Forrest Gump” and “American Beauty,” all films with overwhelming popular support. . In 1998, Jim Carrey won a Golden Globe for “The Truman Show” but wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar.

While the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. numbers less than a hundred, the academy has more than 5,000 voting members.

“The Golden Globes help single out movies for attention,” says Nancy Utley, president of marketing for Fox Searchlight, which garnered a nomination for Kingsley and Swinton. “The Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. is composed of working journalists. They’ve seen our movies. The academy is much tougher. They don’t get to see every performance. I’m an academy member and I already have 30 screeners [tapes] at home.”

“The academy is an independent body that makes their own decision. They have their own criteria,” said Scott Greenstein, chairman of the young company, USA Films. Still, he was flying because of the company’s nine Golden Globe nominations.

On the small screen, HBO led the pack with 19 Globe nominations, including one each for three of its original series, “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City” and the cable network’s latest hit, “Six Feet Under,” about a family that runs a funeral home in Southern California.

Also nominated were Damian Lewis and Ron Livingston, the lead and supporting actor in HBO’s massive miniseries “Band of Brothers,” which was produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks.

NBC attracted 15 nominations, with expected nods toward its Emmy Award-winning shows, “The West Wing,” “Will & Grace” and “Frasier.”

First-time actor nominee, Charlie Sheen, called the recognition for his work on ABC’s “Spin City” “completely foreign territory. It’s definitely a boost of recognition.”

Times staff writer Susan King contributed to this story.