Golden day for ‘Hours,’ ‘Chicago’

The brassy old-fashioned musical “Chicago” and the literary drama “The Hours” earned the most Golden Globe nominations Thursday, marking them as early favorites for Oscar contention, with the long-delayed, extravagant Martin Scorsese 19th century epic “Gangs of New York” not far behind.

Apparently rebounding after a slow award season last year, Miramax dominated this year’s Globe nominations, garnering the most of any studio with eight for “Chicago” and five for “Gangs of New York.” In addition, “The Hours,” a Paramount/Miramax co-production, received seven nominations from the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., including one for best picture-drama and two for best actress-drama for Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman.

The Globe nominations, which are seen as fairly reliable indicators of Academy Award bids (the Oscar nominations will be announced Feb. 11), turned out to be good news for such films as “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” “About Schmidt,” “Adaptation,” “The Pianist” and “About a Boy,” as well as for such actors as Diane Lane, a best actress nominee for “Unfaithful,” and Goldie Hawn, a surprise best actress nominee for “The Banger Sisters.” The 60th annual Globe awards will be given out Jan. 19 and will air on NBC.

Not faring well were two DreamWorks films, “The Road to Perdition” and “Catch Me if You Can,” each of which received only one nomination. “Far From Heaven,” a critical favorite and winner of the New York Film Critics Circle award, failed to get a best picture nomination, although its stars, Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid, were both nominated.

Besides “The Hours,” other nominees for best picture-drama are the dark comedy “About Schmidt,” “Gangs of New York,” the second part of the fantasy adventure “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” and Roman Polanski’s Holocaust drama “The Pianist.”

“Chicago” will compete for best picture-musical or comedy with the coming-of-age film “About a Boy”; the surreal Hollywood screenwriting tale “Adaptation”; “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” the highest-grossing independent film ever made; and the latest adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic “Nicholas Nickelby.”

“Chicago” cast members were still recuperating Thursday morning from their glitzy New York premiere the night before when they started getting congratulatory calls about the nominations.

Best-director nominee Rob Marshall was watching an entertainment news show in his New York apartment when he saw that the entire lead cast had been nominated -- Gere for best actor, Renee Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones for best actress, John C. Reilly for best supporting actor and Queen Latifah for best supporting actress. Hailing from Broadway, the Tony award-winning choreographer-director is in exclusive company with such other stage directors as Sam Mendes (“American Beauty”) and Stephen Daldry (“The Hours”), who have successfully crossed over into film. Marshall said he has been blown away by the reaction that his first foray into feature film has caused.

“I hoped to make a movie that maybe a few people would see and that would not be too horrible,” he said, adding that all the hoopla seems like a fantasy. “You just want to say, ‘Did someone make a mistake?’ ”

Zellweger, who plays the murderous Roxie Hart and had never before starred in a musical, was crawling back into bed after a night on the town in New York when she got the call about the nominations. Her response was more typical of the nominees -- unrestrained delight.

“I’m elated,” she said from a car on her way to JFK Airport for a flight back to Los Angeles. “I mean, to turn on the TV and to see Rob Marshall’s name there, my heart was just going to burst.” Fellow “Chicago” nominee Zeta-Jones, who plays murderess Velma Kelly, said she hoped the sweep in nominations would bring back the old “triple threat” actor.

“For so many years, if people knew you could dance and sing, they presumed you could not act,” she said. “And that was a terrible thing.”

Bill Condon, who was nominated for best screenplay with “Chicago,” was making calls from a plane as he was traveling back to Los Angeles.

“Every musical, because they are so infrequently done, carries the weight of the world on their shoulders,” said Condon. “I just hope the genre will come back to life.”

In the best actress-drama category, both Kidman, playing the English novelist Virginia Woolf, and Streep as a modern-day Clarissa Dalloway were nominated for “The Hours.” Other nominees in the category included Salma Hayek for “Frida,” Lane for “Unfaithful” and Moore for “Far From Heaven.”

Lane, who also won the New York Film Critics Circle award for best actress earlier this week, said she struggled to make her character likable.

“I knew [the role] was very challenging,” she said. “I felt it was almost like a dare.... How do you create an adulteress and allow her to be empathized with throughout the disaster she creates?”

Nia Vardalos, who was nominated for best actress in a musical or comedy for her starring role in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” said she was overwhelmed by the nomination and the success of the film. “People ask me if I’m living my dream,” she said Thursday. “I never even dared to dream something like this.”

In the best actor-drama category, Adrien Brody was nominated for his role as a Holocaust musician in “The Pianist”; others nominated were previous Golden Globe winner Michael Caine for his role as a cynical British reporter in “The Quiet American”; Daniel Day-Lewis, who also won critics’ awards for his performance as the brutal Nativist gang leader in “Gangs of New York”; Leonardo DiCaprio for his portrayal of a young con artist in “Catch Me if You Can”; and Jack Nicholson for his bitter retiree in “About Schmidt.”

Caine was sipping tea in the kitchen of his British country estate when he got the word. “It just gets better [each time] because you’ve been nominated before and you’ve won before and they still think you’re good,” said the actor, who has won numerous awards. In the category of best actor-comedy or musical, nominations went to Nicolas Cage for his dual role as screenwriters Charlie and Donald Kaufman in “Adaptation,” Kieran Culkin for his spoiled high school student in “Igby Goes Down,” Richard Gere for his flashy lawyer in “Chicago,” Hugh Grant for playing an adult who refuses to grow up in “About a Boy” and Adam Sandler for portraying an eccentric man who falls in love in “Punch-Drunk Love.”

Grant, who was in town for the premiere of his latest romantic comedy, “Two Weeks Notice,” said he is grateful for the recognition.

“I’m genuinely thrilled, since these things, they don’t come around very often for me,” said Grant, who won in this category eight years ago for “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

In the best director category, nominations went to Stephen Daldry for “The Hours,” Peter Jackson for “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” Spike Jonze for “Adaptation,” Alexander Payne for “About Schmidt” and Scorsese for “Gangs of New York.”

Jackson was nominated last year in this category for “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.” Scorsese has been nominated four previous times in this category. Scorsese said he was particularly proud of this nomination because of all the negative publicity surrounding his film, which was originally slated to come out last year.

“The film had to speak for itself,” he said. “The more we showed it to people, the more it turned around these stories that have preceded the picture.... It was a journey making the movie.”

First-time nominee Payne said the nomination will be “good for the film.”

“It’s nice to have the recognition,” he added. “The definition for filmmaking is groping in the dark. You just don’t know how a film will turn out.”

There were many surprising omissions this year, most notably director Steven Spielberg for “Minority Report” and “Catch Me if You Can.”

DreamWorks might have sabotaged its own chances at a nomination by requesting that “Catch Me if You Can” be considered as a drama rather than musical/comedy.

The nominations will likely give a big boost to such movies as “About a Boy,” which received good reviews but drowned at the domestic box office when it was released in May last year.

This year’s foreign-language film nominees are France’s “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress,” Brazil’s “City of God,” Mexico’s “The Crime of Father Amaro,” China’s “Hero,” Germany’s “Nowhere in Africa” and Spain’s “Talk to Her.”

The Globes are also given out for TV, and once again HBO dominated the main categories. NBC officials -- who were said to have been less than thrilled in January when their Golden Globe Awards telecast turned into an HBO promotional parade -- could face the same scenario next year.

The pay-TV service, which at the last ceremony swept the two main TV categories -- comedy and drama series -- with “Sex and the City” and “Six Feet Under” -- garnered 26 nominations this year, twice as many as its nearest competitor, NBC. That included repeat nominations for “Sex and the City” and “Six Feet Under,” nods to “The Sopranos” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and continued dominance in the area of made-for-TV movies.

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Times staff writer Rachel Abramowitz and Brian Lowry contributed to this report.