Golden Globes Don't Shine on Dark Knight...and Other Surprises

Superhero blockbuster gets shut out of Best Drama; picks up just one nomination, for Heath Ledger

Batman, meet your new foe: The Hollywood Foreign Press.

The Dark Knight, which had been picking up all the right endorsements in the run-up to the Oscars, failed to win over Golden Globe voters, earning just one nomination.

Or, as many as Pineapple Express and Miley Cyrus. (More on the surprise contender, and the surprisingly non-surprise contender, respectively, in a bit.)

As expected, The Dark Knight's Heath Ledger was nominated posthumously for playing Batman's longtime foil, the Joker.

As not expected, The Dark Knight didn't figure in anywhere else—not in the Best Drama race and not in the Best Director field, where Christopher Nolan was denied.

If it could be argued the superhero blockbuster didn't translate to members of the Hollywood Foreign Press, then how to explain James Franco's acting nomination for the all-American stoner hit, Pineapple Express?

Maybe the Riddler counted the ballots?

Other nomination weirdness:

• Cyrus' songwriting nomination for Bolt's "I Thought I Lost You" is her second of the week, after one for the Critics' Choice Awards. Next stop: the Oscars?
• Yesterday, Milk won Best Picture from the New York Film Critics Circle. Today, it got Dark Knighted, rating one nomination, and one nomination only, for Sean Penn.
• Franco's and Tom Cruise's names both scored laughs at the nominations press conference.
• Cruise is up for Tropic Thunder, which works for him since his upcoming Valkyrie is getting zip from the award-season hander-outers.
• Like Generalissimo Francisco Franco, Hugh Jackman's and Nicole Kidman's shutout Australia is still dead.
• The last time The Wrestler's Marisa Tomei was nominated for a Globe was seven years ago.
• The last time The Wrestler's Mickey Rourke was nominated for a Globe was never.
• WALL-E, named the unqualified top film of the year by Los Angeles critics, was merely a qualified animation candidate today. (It also rated a song nomination.)
• Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder nominations aside, comedy was slighted, per usual. All of the Best Director candidates came from the Best Drama category.
• The title of most nominations for a single household went to Sam Mendes and Kate Winslet. The husband was a directing nominee for Revolutionary Road; the wife was a double acting nominee, for Revolutionary Road and The Reader.
• If at least one of your cowriters wasn't name-brand famous, you were toast in the Best Original Song category, which pits Cyrus against Clint Eastwood (for Gran Torino's "Gran Torino"), Peter Gabriel (for WALL-E's "Down to Earth"), Beyoncé Knowles (for Cadillac Records' "Once in a Lifetime) and Bruce Springsteen (for The Wrestler's "The Wrestler").
• One of Eastwood's nominated collaborators was Kyle Eastwood, his jazz-musician son.
• Eastwood racked up two nominations, for Best Song and Best Score (Changeling), but not for directing or acting.
• It's not TV, it's Tom Wilkinson. Thanks to HBO, the respected British thesp notched nominations as Best Actor in TV Movie/Miniseries for the cable net's Recount and Best Supporting Actor for its John Adams.
• Oh, you were expecting Iron Man to have better luck with Globe voters than Dark Knight? Sorry. It and Hancock, another hit superhero movie, combined to nab zero nominations.

(Originally published Dec. 11, 2008, at 6:49 a.m. PT.)