LOS ANGELES: Hollywood’s award season kicks off this week at a very different Golden Globes, with a mainly virtual ceremony set to boost or dash the Oscars hopes of early frontrunners like Nomadland and The Trial of the Chicago 7.

Usually a star-packed, laid-back party that draws Tinseltown’s biggest names to a Beverly Hills hotel ballroom, this pandemic edition will be broadcast from two scaled-down venues in California and New York, with frontline and essential workers among the few in attendance.

Deprived of its usual glamour, the Globes — which also honour the best in television — remain a coveted prize, and a high-profile source of momentum in the run-up to the season-crowning Oscars, which were pushed back this year to April.

“Nomadland,” Chloe Zhao’s paean to a marginalized, older generation of Americans roaming the West in rundown vans, has long been viewed as a frontrunner for the Globes’ top prize. But it will face stiff competition from Aaron Sorkin’s Chicago 7, a courtroom drama about the city’s anti-war riots in 1968 with a mouth-watering ensemble cast including Mark Rylance, Eddie Redmayne and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Both films are fueled by their timely themes of protest and joblessness.

“I think that it’s likeliest between them,” said The Hollywood Reporter’s awards columnist Scott Feinberg.

Published in Dawn, March 1st, 2021