Following the presentation of the Golden Globe awards on Sunday night and the announcement of the Directors' Guild of America nominations, three films are now firmly established as the front-runners in this year's unusually open Oscars race. Between them The Truman Show, Shakespeare In Love and Saving Private Ryan took eight of the 13 film prizes in this year's Globes.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which presents the Globes, distinguishes between dramas and musicals or comedies in three categories - best film, actor and actress. And there were no surprises when Steven Spielberg was named best director and Saving Private Ryan took the award for best film (drama). In musical or comedy, Shakespeare In Love won for best film and best actress (Gwyneth Paltrow), and it also took the screenplay award for writers Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman. In drama, Jim Carrey pipped frontrunners Tom Hanks and Nick Nolte by taking best actor for The Truman Show, and that film added to its tally when Ed Harris was voted best supporting actor and the best original score award went to Burkhard Dallwitz and Philip Glass.
The award for best actor (musical or comedy) was given to Michael Caine for his fine comeback performance in Little Voice, while in another comeback, Lynn Redgrave was named best supporting actress for Gods And Monsters. The Australian actress Cate Blanchett received the best actress (drama) award for Elizabeth.
The Brazilian film, Central Station, received the award for best foreign-language film, and best original song went to David Foster and Carole Bayer Sager for The Prayer from the animated feature, Quest For Camelot.
Three films set during the second World War figured in the Directors' Guild of America (DGA) nominations on Monday when the shortlist included Steven Spielberg for Saving Private Ryan, Terrence Malick for his first film in 20 years, The Thin Red Line, and Roberto Benigni for La Vita E Bella (Life Is Beautiful). The Malick film had been totally ignored in the Golden Globe nominations, while the Benigni was ineligible for them on a technicality.
Completing an international DGA shortlist were the Australian director, Peter Weir for The Truman Show and the English filmmaker, John Madden, for Shakespeare In Love. The DGA nominations are important not only because they are given out by the directors' peers, but because only four times since 1949 has the winner of the DGA award not gone on to win the best director at the Academy Awards. This year's DGA awards will be presented in Los Angeles on March 6th.
Meanwhile, in the run-up to the announcement of the Oscar nominations on February 9th, the American magazine Entertainment Weekly has tipped four films for best picture nominations - Saving Private Ryan, The Truman Show, Shakespeare in Love and La Vita E Bella. The magazine's tip for the dark horse to take the fifth and final place on that shortlist is none other than the stage-Oirish lottery comedy, Waking Ned Devine, which was filmed in the Isle of Man.
Congratulations to the Irish actress Joan Sheehy, who was awarded the Golden Eve for best actress last weekend at the Donne in Corto TransEurope International Women's Short Film Festival in Rome. She received the award for her endearing portrayal of a woman whose birthday celebrations go awry and who frantically tries to attract the attention of her neighbour (Brendan Coyle) in Martin Mahon's short film, Happy Birthday To Me, which competed at Cannes last year.
"It's wonderful to realise that this film is being seen and celebrated in Europe," Joan Sheehy says. "It's a particular honour to receive this award from Italy, a country whose films have thrilled, enchanted and inspired me." She is at present recording extracts from Kate O'Brien's The Land Of Spices for the RTE Radio 1 afternoon programme, The Book On One.
Tom Cruise has finished filming a supporting role in Magnolia, the new movie from Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson, in which Cruise plays a fast-talking television pitch-man peddling a videotape which instructs men how to seduce one woman after another. Cruise, whose role calls for the use of sexually explicit terms, insisted that filming was carried out in strict secrecy and he has stipulated that his billing is no bigger than that of his co-stars, Jason Robards and Julianne Moore.
Has Shakespeare In Love made writer's block sexy? Michael Douglas will play an overweight, hard-living writer who suffers from that condition in The Wonder Boys. Frances McDormand will co-star as his lover in the film, which will be directed by Curtis Hanson, who made LA Confidential.
John Travolta will team with Kelly Preston in Standing Room Only, the biopic of singer Jimmy Roselli, who was a favourite of the Mafia until he rejected them. It will be first time for Travolta and Preston to work together since they met while making The Experts 12 years ago, after which they married. And it will be Travolta's first singing role since Grease in 1978. "It's the movie I've been waiting to make for 20 years," says Travolta. "It's the kind of movie no one does any more - a gritty, realistic musical." The film will be directed by Gus Van Sant and shooting starts in mid-March.
Peter Ustinov has made a flying visit to Los Angeles to film a one-day cameo role in The Bachelor, a remake of Buster Keaton's 1925 silent comedy, Seven Chances. He plays the grandfather who bequeaths Chris O'Donnell's character $100 million if he marries before his 30th birthday. Among the other cameo appearances in the movie are Mariah Carey, Brooke Shields, Hal Holbrook and James Cromwell.
Promotional packages of top sirloin steak have been sent out to film critics, and delegates at the Sundance Film Festival are being offered beef jerky as part of the campaign to publicise the new movie, Ravenous - which deals with cannibalism. Directed by Antonia Bird and set in a desolate military outpost in the Old West, Ravenous stars Robert Carlyle as a cannibal with an insatiable hunger for his fellow man. Guy Pearce co-stars.
"The film satirises a dog-eat-dog society and how we get obsessed with things," says Bird. But, she says, the gore is more implied than seen and Carlyle's character cooks the flesh in stews. "It's done in a very civilised way, with side dishes," she says. That is most reassuring to hear.
