'Up in the Air' leads Golden Globes With Six Noms

Broadcatching

LOS ANGELES TIMES

Meryl Streep, Matt Damon and Sandra Bullock receive double nominations.

By Susan King, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

December 15, 2009

Things were looking up for the seriocomedy “Up in the Air,” which led the field with six nominations this morning at the 67th annual Golden Globe Awards.

George Clooney was nominated for best performance by an actor in a drama for his role as a corporate downsizer, and costars Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga were both nominated for best supporting actress. The film also was nominated for best drama of the year, as well as best director for Jason Reitman and best screenplay.

The musical “Nine,” which opens in limited release Friday, scored five nominations, while “Avatar,” which also opens Friday, and “Inglourious Basterds” earned four nods apiece. The Iraq war drama “The Hurt Locker,” which has been sweeping critics awards, earned three, though none of its actors received nominations. The critical darling “Precious,” the hit of the Sundance Film Festival, also received three nominations, including best film, best actress in a drama for Gabourey Sidibe and supporting actress for Mo’Nique. However, the film was snubbed in the best director and screenplay categories.

On the TV front, the nominations from the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. were music to the ears of those at “Glee,” Fox’s freshman series about a quirky high school glee club. The acclaimed musical comedy series dominated the TV nods this morning, earning four, including best TV comedy series, best actress for Lea Michele, best supporting actress for Jane Lynch and best actor for Matthew Morrison. Along with “Up in the Air” and “Precious,” the nominees in the best dramatic film category are “Avatar,” “The Hurt Locker” and “Inglourious Basterds.”

Vying for best actor in a drama along with Clooney are Jeff Bridges for “Crazy Heart,” Colin Firth for “A Single Man,” Morgan Freeman for “Invictus” and Tobey Maguire for “Brothers.” Missing from the list: Viggo Mortensen for “The Road.”

Actress Meryl Streep scored not one but two Golden Globe nods, for “Julie & Julia” and “It’s Complicated.” Sandra Bullock, Matt Damon and Anna Paquin were also double nominees. Bullock was nominated for best actress in a comedy/musical for “The Proposal” as well as for the drama “The Blind Side.” Damon earned a best actor nod for “The Informant!” and supporting actor for “Invictus.” Paquin earned a nomination for best actress in a TV drama series for “True Blood” as well as best actress in a miniseries or motion picture made for TV for “The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler.”

The nominees for best comedy/musical motion picture are “(500) Days of Summer,” “The Hangover,” “It’s Complicated,” “Julie & Julia” and “Nine.” Noticeably missing from the list was the Disney/Pixar animated hit “Up” – there were hopes in some quarters that the critically acclaimed film would break through in this category. It did earn a nod in the category of best animated film, along with “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” “Coraline,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “The Princess and the Frog.”

Bullock and Sidibe were joined in the best actress in a drama category by Emily Blunt for “The Young Victoria,” Helen Mirren for “The Last Station” and Carey Mulligan for “An Education.”

Vying with Bullock and Streep for best actress in the comedy/musical category are Marion Cotillard for “Nine” and Julia Roberts for “Duplicity.” Besides Damon, nominees for best actor in a comedy/musical are Daniel Day-Lewis for “Nine,” Robert Downey Jr. for “Sherlock Holmes,” Joseph Gordon-Levitt for “(500) Days of Summer” and Michael Stuhlbarg for “A Serious Man.”

Rounding out the category of best supporting actress in a film are Penelope Cruz for “Nine” and Julianne Moore for “A Single Man.” Joining Damon in the best supporting actor category are Woody Harrelson for “The Messenger,” Christopher Plummer for “The Last Station,” Stanley Tucci for “The Lovely Bones” and Christoph Waltz for “Inglourious Basterds.”

Nominated for best director along with Reitman are Kathryn Bigelow for “The Hurt Locker,” James Cameron for “Avatar,” Clint Eastwood for “Invictus” and Quentin Tarantino for “Inglourious Basterds.” (Bigelow and Cameron were once married. In what looks like a Golden Globe first in the directing category, the ex-spouses will be pitted against each other.)

Other big TV winners include “30 Rock,” “Big Love,” “Damages,” “Dexter” and, of course, “Mad Men.” All earned three nominations apiece. “Big Love,” “Dexter,” “Mad Men,” “House” and “True Blood” were nominated for best drama series. Joining “Glee” in the best comedy series category are “30 Rock,” “Entourage,” “Modern Family” and “The Office.”

The awards will be handed out Jan. 17 in a three-hour telecast on NBC from the Beverly Hilton Hotel International Ballroom. Though the Globes have been known for a rather raucous, party atmosphere, the ceremony has become much more subdued in recent years. But that may be about to change. For the first time in years, the Globes have a host — the irreverent British actor-writer-director Ricky Gervais of the original “The Office” and “Extras.” The censors had better have their hands on the delay button due to Gervais’ acerbic, R-rated humor.

Though the Globes are considered a bellwether for the Academy Awards, the two groups have diverged in their choices on many occasions, especially since the Globes divided their films into dramatic and comedy/musical categories. Most recently, both groups named “Slumdog Millionaire” as the best film of the year. But one year earlier, Globes selected “Atonement” as the best of 2007 and the academy awarded “No Country for Old Men” the top Oscar statuette.

susan.king@latimes.com

Stooges, Genesis, ABBA Get Rock Hall Of Fame Nods

Rock and Roll
by Gary Graff, Detroit  |   December 15, 2009 10:01 EST

The Stooges, Genesis, ABBA, the Hollies and Jimmy Cliff will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the shrine’s 25th annual ceremony on March 15 at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City. They’ll be joined by David Geffen and a cadre of songwriters — Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil, Ellie Greenwich & Jeff Barry, Jesse Stone, Mort Shuman and Otis Blackwell — who will receive the Ahmet Ertegun Award for non-performers.

The ceremony will be broadcast live on Fuse TV.

Surprisingly not making the cut were KISS and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were thought to be frontrunners when the short list of nominees was announced in September.

Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks tells Billboard.com that the induction is “nice to happen” and that it’s an honor to be the second British progressive rock band, after Pink Floyd, to join the Hall. “I suppose it being American-based and all that it just concentrates slightly more on that type of music,” he says. Which members of Genesis might perform at the ceremony is somewhat up in the air due to Phil Collins’ recent surgery to repair dislocated vertebrae. “Phil’s got a few physical problems at the moment which means I don’t think he’d be able to play, so…I don’t really know what that means,” Banks says. “We’ll face that particular hurdle when we get to it.”

Hollies veteran Graham Nash calls the group’s induction “well-deserved,” noting that “they were a very large part of the British Invasion. They were a very large part of early, you know, English rock. They had a couple of dozen Top 10 hits (in the U.K.), and hits over here (in the U.S.), and why not?” His longtime colleague Stephen Stills was “so happy” for Nash and cracked that “now he can quit feeling inferior” because Stills and David Crosby have each been inducted into the Hall more than once. But, Stills adds, “I thought (the Hollies) was a great band, and we all wanted to sing like that. The fact I ended up with one of their singers is one of the luckiest things in my life.”

ABBA is unlikely to regroup for a performance at the March ceremony, but the Stooges, in the wake of founding guitarist Ron Asheton’s death in early January, have already been planning a 2010 tour with “Raw Power” era guitarist James Williamson. The group has been nominated for the Hall seven previous times.

Tiger Woods Doctor Under Investigation For HGH Distribution

Steroids, The Tiger

RADAR ONLINE


By Doug
Created 12/15/2009 – 10:34am

With all the focus on Tiger Woods’ game off the golf course, a new report might bring some unwanted scrutiny to his conduct on the links, as well: Dr. Anthony Galea, a Canadian doctor who has treated the legendary golfer, is under FBI investigation for providing athletes with performance-enhancing drugs.

Galea, according to the New York Times, was taken into custody October 15 in Toronto by Canadian police, after he was found carrying human growth hormone (HGH) and Actovegin in his bag at the border of the U.S. and Canada in September.

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Galea, according to the paper, made trips to Woods’ Florida mansion on four occasions in February and March of this year to administer therapy after the golfer was slow to heal from a June 2008 knee surgery.

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Tiger’s agent, Mark Steinberg — presumably flooded with other issues relating to his client — wrote in an e-mail to the paper, when asked about the matter, “I would really ask that you guys don’t write this? If Tiger is NOT implicate, and won’t be, let’s please give the kid a break.”

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A Key British Official Reminds Us of the Forgotten Anthrax Attack

Iraq

By Glenn Greenwald

S A L O N

Britain is currently engulfed by a probing, controversial investigation into how their Government came to support the invasion of Iraq, replete with evidence that much of what was said at the time by both British and American officials was knowingly false, particularly regarding the unequivocal intention of the Bush administration to attack Iraq for months when they were pretending otherwise.  Yesterday, the British Ambassador to the U.S. in 2002 and 2003, Sir Christopher Meyer (who favored the war), testified before the investigative tribunal and said this:

Meyer said attitudes towards Iraq were influenced to an extent not appreciated by him at the time by the anthrax scare in the US soon after 9/11. US senators and others were sent anthrax spores in the post, a crime that led to the death of five people, prompting policymakers to claim links to Saddam Hussein. . . .

On 9/11 Condoleezza Rice, then the US national security adviser, told Meyer she was in “no doubt: it was an al-Qaida operation” . . . It seemed that Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy, argued for retaliation to include Iraq, Meyer said. . . .

But the anthrax scare had “steamed up” policy makers in Bush’s administration and helped swing attitudes against Saddam, who the administration believed had been the last person to use anthrax.

I’ve written many times before about how the anthrax attack played at least as large of a role as the 9/11 attack itself, if not larger, in creating the general climate of fear that prevailed for years in the U.S. and specifically how the anthrax episode was exploited by leading media and political figures to gin up intense hostility towards Iraq (a few othersflushed this terrorist attack down the memory hole as though it doesn’t exist.  When Dana Perino boasted this week on Fox News that “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term,” most of the resulting derision focused on the 9/11 attack while ignoring — as always — the anthrax attack. have argued the same).  That’s why it’s so striking how we’ve collectively

What makes this particularly significant is that the anthrax attack is unresolved and uninvestigated. The FBI claimed last year that it had identified the sole perpetrator, Bruce Ivins, but because Ivins is dead, they never had the opportunity — or the obligation — to prove their accusations in any meaningful tribunal.  The case against Ivins is so riddled with logical and evidentiary holes that it has generated extreme doubts not merely from typical government skeptics but from the most mainstream, establishment-revering, and ideologically disparate sources.  Just consider some of the outlets and individuals who have stated unequivocally that the FBI’s case against Ivinis is unpersausive and requires a meaningful investigation:  The Washington Post Editorial Page; The New York Times Editorial Page; The Wall St. Journal Editorial Page; the science journal Nature; Senators Pat Leahy, Arlen Specter and Charles Grassley; physicist and Congressman Rush Holt, whose New Jersey district was where the anthrax letters were sent; Dr. Alan Pearson, Director of the Biological and Chemical Weapons Control Program at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation; and a vast array of scientific and legal experts in the field.

Here we have one of the most consequential political events of the last decade at least — a lethal biological terrorist attack aimed at key U.S. Senators and media figures, which even the FBI claims originated from a U.S. military lab.  The then-British Ambassador to the U.S. is now testifying what has long been clear:  that this episode played a huge role in enabling the attack on Iraq.  Even our leading mainstream, establishment-serving media outlets — and countless bio-weapons experts — believe that we do not have real answers about who perpetrated this attack and how.  And there is little apparent interest in investigating in order to find out.  Evidently, this is just another one of those things that we’ll relegate to “the irrelevant past,” and therefore deem it unworthy of attention from our future-gazing, always-distracted minds.

UPDATE:  Marcy Wheeler notes that the FBI has become increasingly defiant towards requests that its claims be reviewed by an independent panel; of course, that couldn’t happen unless the White House and Congress permitted it to.

National Broadcasting Company Soon To Be Owned By Cable

Media, NBC, Television, Vivendi

NEW YORK TIMES DEALBOOK BLOG (Sorkin)

Carter / Merced Reporting

November 30, 2009, 8:17 pm <!– — Updated: 8:33 pm –>

G.E. and Vivendi Agree on Value of NBC Universal

Update | 8:28 p.m. General Electric has reached a tentative agreement to buy Vivendi’s 20 percent stake in NBC Universal for about $5.8 billion, helping clear the path to a sale of the television and movie company to Comcast, people briefed on the matter told DealBook.

But much remains to be negotiated, these people warned. The Vivendi agreement values NBC Universal at $29 billion, less than the $30 billion or so that G.E. and Comcast had agreed to last month.

Harmonizing the two values, as in so much of the talks over NBC Universal, may take days to do, and these people cautioned that a deal may not be reached.

Still, many analysts and people close to the talks expect a deal to be forged soon, and with it a reshaping of the entertainment industry.

The groundwork for the tentative pact between G.E. and Vivendi was laid out last week, when G.E.’s chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, met in person with his counterpart at Vivendi, Jean-Bernard Lévy, in Paris, these people said.

If it holds, the agreement would conclude weeks of hardball negotiations between G.E. and Vivendi over an alliance first forged in 2004. Resolving the issue of Vivendi’s stake is crucial to completing the G.E.-Comcast deal. But the French company took a tough stance, brandishing its option of holding an initial public offering for its stake rather than selling it back to G.E.

Under the current outlines of the agreement between G.E. and Comcast, NBC Universal would be put into a new joint venture, between the two giants. Comcast would pour billions of dollars in cash and its own cable channels for a 51 percent stake, while G.E. would hold an initial 49 percent and contribute about $12 billion in debt.

G.E., which has owned NBC for more than two decades, is expected to eventually sell its ownership interest to Comcast over the next several years.

– Michael J. de la Merced and Bill Carter