“Nine” Leads Indie Heavy Golden Satellite Nods

A scene from Rob Marshall's "Nine." Image courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

Rob Marshall’s “Nine” led the always interesting, occasionally non-sensical Golden Satellite nominations, which were announced this morning. The film took 11 nominations, including best picture (comedy or musical), best director, and acting nods for Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard and Penelope Cruz. 

While the awards - handed out by International Press Academy - are generally disregarded as a serious Oscar precursor due to their often inexplainable decisions (see this year’s “top ten list,” which for some reason does not coincide with their best picture nominees), this year’s batch is definitely full of worthy nominees, particularly from the specialty sector. All six of the nominees for best picture (drama) hail from specialty distributors - “Bright Star,” “An Education,” “The Hurt Locker,” “The Messenger,” “Precious” and the out-of-nowhere inclusion of “The Stoning of Soraya M,” while admirable acting nod inclusions of “The Maid”‘s Catalina Saavedra,  “The Damned United”‘s Michael Sheen and Timothy Spall, and “The Stoning of Soraya M.“‘s Mozhan Marno and Shohreh Aghdashloo continued the trend.

Additionally interesting was the best director category, where three of the six nominations went to women (Jane Campion, Lone Scherfig and Kathryn Bigelow), two to openly gay men (Lee Daniels and Rob Marshall), and one to the South African director of a summer sci-fi film (Neill Blomkamp).  Not present were “Up In The Air”‘s Jason Reitman, “Inglourious Basterds”‘s Quentin Tarantino,” or “A Serious Man”‘s Joel & Ethan Coen.

Surprise omissions (if there can be such a thing as a “surprise” here) included favorites like “Precious”‘s Gabourey Sidibe (though Sidibe did receive a special award for “outstanding new talent”), “A Single Man”‘s Julianne Moore, “Up In The Air”‘s Anna Kendrick, “The Last Station”‘s Helen Mirren, and “Julie & Julia”‘s Stanley Tucci, while as-yet-unreleased films like “Invictus,” “The Lovely Bones,” “Brothers” and “Avatar” were all shut out entirely, more than likely because they didn’t screen for the IFA (though nominees “Nine” and “It’s Complicated” both did).

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Check out the entire list of nominations on the following page. The winners will be announced Sunday, December 20, 2009 at the Grand Salon of the InterContinental Hotel in Century City, California. Last year’s winners included “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Happy-Go-Lucky” in the best picture categories, while Angelina Jolie, Richard Jenkins, Sally Hawkins, Ricky Gervais, Rosemarie deWitt and Michael Shannon all won acting trophies.   (1 of 2)  Next Page › posted on November 29, 2009 |Share