La La Land is set to dominate the 74th edition of the Golden Globe Awards, taking altogether seven nominations, including best comedy or musical, best director, best actress in a comedy or musical and best actor in a comedy or musical.
The film La La Land, which was victorious last night at Critics Circle Award, is about the mournful romance about the relationship between a jazz pianist played by Ryan Gosling and an aspiring actor Emma Stone. It is a third feature of Chazelle, 31, whose Whiplash was a crowd-pleasing critical hit almost two years ago. The film opened up last Friday and scored a record-breaking per screen average of $171,000.
Trailing in second place behind La La Land is Moonlight, Barry Jenkin's acclaimed drama about a black gay man at three stages of his life. The Artist, took six nominations, including best picture, best screenplay, best supporting actor (for Mahershala Ali) and best supporting actress (for Naomie Harris).
Third place was quite a surprise - Manchester by the Sea, which took five nominations, Kenneth Lonergan's drama starring Casey Affleck as a depressed Boston janitor returning to his hometown.
Tying for the fourth were Lion, in which Dev Patel plays a man seeking his long-lost family with the help of Google Earth, and Stephen Frears' Florence Foster Jenkins, about a dreadful yet deluded singer in 1940s New York.
The Awards are basically voted by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, an LA-based group of around 90 foreign journalists.
Issa Rae, Natalie Portman and Ruth Negga were also nominees for their work on both television and film, highlighting the scope of the awards. "Sausage Party" was shut out of most of the (announced) noms. "Zootopia" slipped into the Animated Feature nominations. The biggest surprise arrives when they were Multiple nods for comic book underdog "Deadpool."
