Clooney adds weight to movie's Oscar chance

The tale of a corporate hatchet man who travels the US sacking people and obsessively collecting air-miles has emerged as the front-runner in the early stages of Hollywood's awards season, as George Clooney's recession-era satire Up in the Air drew six nominations to lead the field for next month's Golden Globes.

Nominations for Clooney as Best Actor in a Drama, along with co-stars Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick, helped the film narrowly overtake other fancied titles including a musical, Nine, a drama, Precious, war movies The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds, and James Cameron's Avatar when the shortlist was unveiled yesterday.

Competing with Clooney for the acting award will be Jeff Bridges, Morgan Freeman, Tobey Maguire and British actor Colin Firth, whose portrayal of a suicidal gay academic in A Single Man, Tom Ford's adaptation of the Christopher Isherwood novel, garnered his first nomination for a major Hollywood award.

The Best Actress in a Drama category was also a bright spot for British prospects.

It will pitch Emily Blunt (The Young Victoria), Helen Mirren (The Last Station) and newcomer Carey Mulligan (An Education) against US rivals Gabourey Sibie, the star of Precious, and Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side).

The Golden Globes, which are chosen by the votes of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, have a mixed record in predicting the outcome of the Oscars, which are held in March. But the event still has totemic significance.

Its early scheduling, on a Sunday in mid-January, helps set the tone for later red-carpet events.

That is why Up in the Air's inclusion in the Drama category (when many pundits predicted that it would be shortlisted for the less prestigious Best Comedy or Musical) may add momentum to its challenge for the Oscars, where weightier titles usually tend to dominate.

It also underlines the way in which this dark satire, which subverts corporate culture and confronts the topical issue of redundancy, has caught the spirit of the age, in a country where the unemployment rate is still hovering around 10 per cent.

"I can't put into words how exciting it is to feel and to know that I'll be going to the Golden Globes with everyone I worked with on this film," said Up in the Air director Jason Reitman, who adapted it from a novel he chanced upon in a second-hand bookshop.

Reitman, who was yesterday celebrating nominations in the Best Director and Best Screenwriter categories, is best known for the films Juno and Thank You For Smoking, which both punched above their commercial weight in awards seasons.

Up in the Air's nearest rival for the huge number of nominations is Nine, by the creator of the film version of Chicago Rob Marshall, which was shortlisted for five Globes in the Musical or Comedy category, including acting slots for Daniel Day-Lewis, Penelope Cruz and Marion Cotillard.

The joker in the pack, though, is Avatar, which was frozen out of Acting categories but nonetheless scooped four selections.

The film took seven years to make, cost between $350 million and $500 million, and has been well-reviewed in advance of its opening this weekend.

Hollywood hopes it will go on to mount a strong Oscar challenge, in the same way that Cameron's last blockbuster, Titanic, swept the board in 1997.

Otherwise, there will be few commercial hits in the running for major prizes this awards season, aside perhaps from Up and The Hangover.

Viewing figures for awards ceremonies have been steadily declining in recent years, a trend many have blamed on the tendency of judges to ignore films that make waves at the box office.

Last year The Dark Knight, one of the highest-grossing films, failed to make even the Best Picture shortlist.

That resulted in the third-worst viewing figures ever for an Oscar ceremony and prompted the Academy to announce that this year they will widen the nominations for the Best Film category to 10 titles in an effort to restore the event's popularity.

- INDEPENDENT