Best film (drama)

Should win: Moonlight

Will win: Manchester By the Sea

Two movies stand out, and making the now traditional should win/will win pick is very difficult. Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight has commanded praise wherever and whenever it has screened, as a superbly crafted, beautifully acted, structurally audacious movie about gay and African-American sensibilities, transforming its theatrical origins into something like a personal epic of inner life. Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester By the Sea has the same seriousness and solidity, and a fluent way of combining high drama and wry comedy. Of the two, MBTS is the more accessible and conventional, though a win for Moonlight would certainly be a satisfying rebuke to the new fashion for crude and ugly reactionary politics – and a vote for humanity.



Best film (musical or comedy)

Should win: La La Land

Will win: La La Land

The Globes are notable for creating a space for comedies and musicals – a valuable generic priority when awards voters elsewhere are encouraged always to bow the collective knee to movies they admire more but may secretly enjoy less. Damien Chazelle’s La La Land is a conspicuously worthy recipient: a wonderfully entertaining, old-fashioned movie musical with a great romantic pairing in Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. It’s a homage to the former classics that doesn’t seem supercilious but open-hearted and ingenuous; a bold and ambitious step up for the director of Whiplash.

Watching with interest … Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in La La Land. Photograph: Allstar/Lionsgate

Best actor (drama)

Should win: Casey Affleck (Manchester By the Sea)

Will win: Casey Affleck (Manchester By the Sea)

Casey Affleck expresses a certain kind of wounded and unexpressed masculinity in Lonergan’s Manchester By the Sea. In many ways it is a film about male anger, and Affleck portrays and embodies that anger: it pulses off him like a heating element. He shows how this bottled rage reacts with anxiety and guilt and creates a kind of perverted eroticism in the way he goes to bars, ignores the attention of women and instead looks for men to fight. It is the performance with the most complexity and depth on this list.

Best actress (drama)

Should win: Isabelle Huppert (Elle)

Will win: Amy Adams (Arrival)

For her pure outrageousness and inscrutable hauteur, Isabelle Huppert deserves to win for her typically imperious turn in Paul Verhoeven’s rape-revenge black comedy Elle. She is not a victim or even a survivor, but a lethal counterattacker, counterstrategist, counterdominator. It is the kind of performance that is usually given for a Tudor queen. Elsewhere, this is a strong list. Natalie Portman has much admired for her portrayal of Jackie Kennedy and Ruth Negga gives a performance of tremendous subtlety in Loving, but Amy Adams is such a star turn in the sci-fi contact drama Arrival that I think she has this prize locked down.

Brief encounter … Amy Adams in Arrival. Photograph: Allstar/Paramount Pictures

Best actor (musical or comedy)

Should win: Ryan Gosling (La La Land)

Will win: Ryan Gosling (LA La Land)

Ryan Gosling is an actor who has matured and become more sympathetic (to use an awful word: relatable) by venturing into comedy. Shane Black’s The Nice Guys was a smart move, and La La Land was smarter still. He has a face custom built for “sardonic” yet can also manage that tough-guy gallantry that is important for this role, playing the jaded jazz club manager who falls hard for Emma Stone’s beautiful wannabe star. Elsewhere, Hugh Grant is very good as the venal impresario-enabler in Florence Foster Jenkins. The same goes for Ryan Reynolds in the excellent Deadpool. But this will be Gosling’s night.

Best actress (musical or comedy)

Should win: Emma Stone (La La Land)

Will win: Meryl Streep (Florence Foster Jenkins)

Emma Stone is entirely beguiling in La La Land: smart, romantic, funny. There’s a kind of funkily satirical self-awareness in her performance that transforms her vulnerability into strength. Casting her instead of a more natural singer such as Anna Kendrick (whose excellent musical The Last Five Years this slightly resembles) showcased the comedy for this character. My feeling though is that the Foreign Press Association will once again – and understandably – roll over for Meryl Streep for the umpteenth time, rewarding her tragicomic queenliness as the abysmal society warbler Mrs Jenkins.

Best supporting actor

Should win: Jeff Bridges (Hell or High Water)

Will win: Jeff Bridges (Hell or High Water)

Again, not a bad lineup, and Dev Patel is really good in Lion: it is a moot point as to whether he should be considered as a leading man. But Jeff Bridges is such a great careworn cop in Hell or High Water, a performance of real weight that gives the movie perspective and ballast and functions very effectively as support to the two young leads. It’s something to compare with Tommy Lee Jones in No Country For Old Men or indeed Michael Shannon in Nocturnal Animals. I found myself thinking, poignantly, of Bridges’s very Texan performance in Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show from 1971.

Top of the cops? … Jeff Bridges with Gil Birmingham in Hell or High Water. Photograph: Allstar/Film 44

Best supporting actress

Should win: Naomie Harris (Moonlight)

Will win: Nicole Kidman (Lion)

Naomie Harris is a superb performer who deserves a substantial leading role. Frustratingly, Hollywood isn’t (yet) giving it to her, but Moonlight has shown what she is capable of – transformed almost beyond recognition. However, my feeling is that the Globe will go to Nicole Kidman who gives a very decent, heartfelt performance as the adoptive mother in Lion. She is not the very best contender, but a Globe for Kidman would be no disgrace.

Best director

Should win: Tom Ford (Nocturnal Animals)

Will win: Tom Ford (Nocturnal Animals)

What a career quantum leap. Tom Ford was the fashion designer (lionised in the movie The Devil Wears Prada for having attracted praise from Meryl Streep’s Wintouresque fashion editor Miranda Priestly) who made a good, if self-conscious, Hollywood debut as writer-director with his drama A Single Man. But Nocturnal Animals is such a step up: dazzling, shocking, mesmeric. With thrilling confidence, he adapted Austin Wright’s much admired novel and made it live as a superb suspense thriller, with its daring double narrative.

Best screenplay

Should win: Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water)

Will win: Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water)

A screenwriting star is born. Taylor Sheridan is the former actor known for a recurring role in the TV biker drama Sons of Anarchy. He went into writing, and stunned the 2015 Cannes film festival with his cracking script for Denis Villeneuve’s crime thriller Sicario. Now he has got another project made: David Mackenzie’s politically aware stickup movie Hell or High Water. Very smart, stylish stuff.