The Golden Globe nominations were announced Thursday morning. The Golden Globes, it should be noted, are distributed by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. What is the HFPA? No one really knows! This is part of the fun of the Golden Globes: Getting riled up about oversights and snubs and such, even though the HFPA is a mystery organization that could be 67-percent Muppet for all we know, and its choices are not typically reliable indicators of who will take home the Oscar/Emmy hardware that really counts. The most important thing about the Golden Globes is that the TV people and the movie people all mix together and get sloshed when they attend the ceremony.
Herein, the most important things to know about this year’s nominees. Read on to be armed with the #hottest of #hottakes for your happy hour discussions this evening.
Oops, the @GoldenGlobes Twitter account thought America Ferrera was Gina RodriguezThe Golden Globes powers-that-be did a great job selecting a diverse group of actors to read the nominees: Angela Bassett, America Ferrera, Chloë Grace Moretz and Dennis Quaid did the honors. But then they did a not-so-great job of identifying Ferrera on their official Twitter account, which repeatedly misidentified her as Jane the Virgin star Gina Rodriguez, another Latina actress.
But speaking of Gina Rodriguez…The Jane in Jane the Virgin is nominated again for the award she won last year: Best Performance By an Actress in a Television Series, Musical, or Comedy. Her rousing, instantly-viral “I can and I did” acceptance speech from last year was such a hit, the CW used it as part of her Emmy Awards “For Your Consideration” campaign.
PSA for the Academy: This is what a diverse acting slate looks likeActors of color are represented all over this list of nominees: From comedy to drama to television to film. Not too shabby, HFPA.
A hat trick for Mr. RobotAs devoted readers of ThinkProgress know, we are big Mr. Robot fans around here. One of the two unlikely breakout smashes of the summer, Mr. Robot exists in a heightened reality that feels like a just-around-the-corner dystopic version of our own. The series is so eerily in touch with reality, it accidentally predicted and echoed it, twice: First with a reference to the “Ashley Madison hack,” a line that was written months before the actual Ashley Madison hack, and then with a graphic scene in the season finale that was so visually and tonally reminiscent of the on-camera killings in Roanoke that the episode was pulled from the air. (The finale aired a week later.) This rookie of the year scored three nominations: Star Rami Malek is up for best actor in a drama series; Christian Slater, who has long understood that the extreme always seems to make an impression, got a best supporting actor nomination; and the show landed a nomination for best drama series, the biggest one it could hope for.
Print might be dead but people really love SpotlightIt’s nominated for Best Drama, Best Director (Tom McCarthy), and Best Screenplay (McCarthy and Josh Singer).
Your favorite stand-up comics are big stars nowIs the secret to comedic success to write your own material? It’s working for Amy Schumer, who continues to have a fantastic year: She’s nominated for her performance in Trainwreck, her feature film debut. (The nomination pits her against her new best friend, some scrappy nobody named Jennifer Lawrence.) It’s working for Aziz Ansari, too, who is nominated for starring in his wonderful new Netflix series, Master of None, which he co-created with Alan Yang.
Is The Hollywood Foreign Press secretly an all-female organization?The Starz time-traveling-romance, Outlander, much beloved by women the nation over, picked up two major nominations: one for best drama series and one for leading lady, Caitriona Balfe. The fantasy series has an overwhelmingly female fanbase: An average of 2.5 million women watched each episode in its first season.
Netflix is nominated for TV shows and movies, will possibly take over the worldNetflix’s marquee shows — I’d call them “hits,” but how would I know? Netflix refuses to release any viewer data — scored in all the major categories. House of Cards star Robin Wright is nominated as a leading actress in a drama; Orange is the New Black is up for best comedy and has Uzo Aduba in the supporting actress in a comedy race. But the real surprise? Idris Elba’s nomination for best supporting actor in Beasts of No Nation, Netflix’s first original feature film.
Women are still underrepresented behind the cameraOnly one woman is nominated for Best Screenplay: Emma Donoghue, who adapted her bestselling novel, Room. Female contenders who could easily have been on this list — to replace, say, Aaron Sorkin, a much-decorated man whose Steve Jobs was so disappointing it was pulled from over 2,000 theaters within weeks of its premiere — include, but are not limited to: Phyllis Nagy (Carol), Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl), Amy Schumer (Trainwreck), Lucinda Coxon (The Danish Girl), Maya Forbes (Infinitely Polar Bear). Zero women were nominated for Best Director.
Network comedies get no loveTake a look at the nominees for Best Television Series, Musical or Comedy: Casual, Mozart in the Jungle, Orange is the New Black, Silicon Valley, Transparent, and Veep. In other words: Hulu, Amazon Video, Netflix, HBO, Amazon Video, and HBO.
The Americans, the best show on TV, received zero nominationsHOW MANY HONEY TRAPS MUST THESE SPIES SET BEFORE GETTING THE AWARDS LOVE THEY DESERVE.
The full list of nominees can be found here. The Golden Globes will air on January 10 on NBC. It is with great sorrow that we remind you Tina Fey and Amy Poehler will not be hosting this year. The host is Ricky Gervais.