Entertainment

Oscar Predictor Or Joke?

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 23, 2000 / 1:32 PM EST / CBS

Movie fans who want a possible preview of the Oscars should tune in to the Golden Globe awards Sunday night.

American Beauty leads all movie contenders: The dark satire on suburbia has six nominations.

The Insider and The Talented Mr. Ripley are close behind with five nominations each.

Perennial winner Tom Hanks was shut out this year despite a widely acclaimed performance as a death-row prison guard in The Green Mile

Jim Carrey, Robert De Niro and Denzel Washington all got nominations in the best actor category. Sigourney Weaver, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore are also up for acting awards.

The Golden Globes also include eleven TV categories.

Nominees for dramatic TV series include E-R and The Sopranos. Nominees for comedy TV series include Ally McBeal and Dharma & Greg.

HBO had the most TV nominations with 18, followed by ABC with 14.

The awards are chosen by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

The 82 voting members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association often complain they get no respect - but now their annual Golden Globe awards have a chance to pick the front-runners in the tightest Oscar race in years.

Although the group is minuscule - and their journalistic credentials the butt of jokes and sharp questioning - close to 300 million people worldwide are expected to tune in to the Golden Globe awards on Sunday to learn the picks for best films and performers of 1999 - plus the best television shows.

And the awards, often touted as a barometer of the Oscars, which are held in March, come not a moment too soon as far as the film industry's oddsmakers are concerned.

Right now, as Daily Variety editor Peter Bart observed, "It is not possible to identify any front-runners for anything."

Every critic or critics' group has named a different best film of 1999 and a different set of best actors, directors and even set designers.

The only thing the critics agree on is that 1999 produced several good films: The Insider, Topsy-Turvy, Being John Malkovich, The Talented Mr. Ripley and American Beauty, to name a few.

But it did not produce the one or two films that dominated the landscape as Titanic, Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love did in recent years.

While many industry experts say the Globes - with the clout that the award ceremony's large television audience brings - can set the stage for the Oscars and generate major buzz for winners, Bart is not impressed.

Long a critic of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, he says he doubts whether the Globes can predict anything at all because all the group has is "80 occasional journalists who have their own clubhouse...They have a good scam and give a good party."

Helmut Voss, a correspondent for Germany's Springer group who is president of the HFPA, is quick to admit that his group is often ridiculed ecause many of its members are part-time reporters or freelancers, often with jobs in other businesses.

Voss said the jokes came with the territory but he had tried in recent years to increase the group's respectability and credibility.

"People have always said we have an influence on the Oscars, and we are happy to go along with that. As far as our numbers go, with 82 voting members and two nonvoting members, we are bigger than the critics' groups," he said.