Hollywood Kicks Off 2014 Awards Season with Golden Globes

BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA — In a year widely regarded as a bountiful one for high-quality films and acting, the Golden Globes weigh in on Sunday with the first big honors of the Hollywood awards season, which  culminates in seven weeks with the Oscars.

Two starkly different American stories lead nominations for the 71st Annual Golden Globe Awards with seven nods apiece - the brutal depiction of pre-Civil War slavery 12 Years a Slave and 1970s corruption caper American Hustle. They will compete for best motion picture in different categories, drama and comedy or musical, respectively.

Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock as an astronaut lost in space and life, also ranks high in experts' predictions and could give 12 Years a Slave a challenge for the night's most coveted award, best drama.

Golden Globes are also given out for television, where established dramas like Breaking Bad and Downton Abbey will compete with the likes of Netflix newcomer House of Cards.

The Golden Globes, under the purview of some 90 journalists in the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, have outsized clout in the awards race as buzz around these first honors influences members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in their voting for the Oscars, which will be handed out March 2.

"You can just see the Oscar voter who starts to hear the buzz build for '12 Years a Slave,' and has been dreading picking up the (DVD) screener to watch the movie," said Keith Simanton, managing editor for the IMDB movie site.

"But he reaches for it, and says to his wife, 'Maybe we ought to watch it.'"

Oscar nominations will be announced on Thursday, but voting has already concluded. The Globes have a mixed record when it comes to predicting the Oscar best picture, though last year's best drama winner, Argo, did go on to win the Academy Award for best movie.

The Golden Globes follow a very good year for film, both commercially and critically. North American box office receipts totaled a record $10.9 billion in 2013 and top performers went beyond the typical blockbuster action movies to include acclaimed films such as Gravity.

Sunday night could also boost the fortunes of smaller films that have fared well among critics, including Joel and Ethan Coen's paean to 1960s folk music Inside Llewyn Davis, Spike Jonze's quirky computer-age romance Her, and Alexander Payne's homage to the heartland Nebraska.

Oscar-winning women compete

The intense competition extends to the acting races, where Britain's Chiwetel Ejiofor will compete for best actor in a drama for his role as the free man sold into slavery in 12 Years a Slave. Matthew McConaughey is also considered a frontrunner for his portrayal of an unlikely AIDS activist in Dallas Buyers Club, for which he lost 50 pounds.

Leonardo DiCaprio will get his shot at best actor in a comedy or musical for his turn as a swindling stockbroker in Martin Scorsese's tale of American greed, The Wolf of Wall Street. He has stiff competition from veteran actor Bruce Dern as a cantankerous and delusional father in Nebraska.

For best actress in a drama, it's a battle between Oscar winners, with Bullock going up against Cate Blanchett for her riches-to-rags role in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine and Judi Dench for her turn as a mother looking for a long-lost son in adoption drama Philomena.

The HFPA will also honor Woody Allen with the Cecil B DeMille award recognizing outstanding contribution to the entertainment field. Allen, famously averse to awards shows, is not expected to collect the honor, but one of his favorite actresses, Diane Keaton, will reportedly stand in for him.

While considered a warm-up for the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes live telecast on Comcast Corp's NBC network offers many of the same ingredients, such as the glamor of the red carpet for Hollywood's leading ladies and the dense concentration of Tinseltown's top talent in one room.

But the Globes serve up cocktails and an air of whimsy and unpredictability in contrast to the more tightly scripted Academy Awards.

Comedians Tina Fey and Amy Poehler will return to host the Golden Globes for the second consecutive year.

Daily coffee might enhance memory

Swarms of morning commuters clutch cups of coffee to kick-start the workday. But a new study suggests caffeine might do more for the brain than boost alertness — it may help memory too.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University looked at caffeine’s impact on memory while excluding its other brain-enhancing factors. The study showed that caffeine enhances certain memories for up to 24 hours after it’s consumed.
“The finding that caffeine has an effect on this process in humans — the process of making memories more permanent, less forgettable — was one of the big novelties,” said study author Michael Yassa, an assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior at the University of California, Irvine.
The study included more than 100 participants who were “caffeine naive,” meaning they were not big coffee, tea or cola drinkers, Yassa said.
“We picked people who were getting less than 500 milligrams of caffeine a week,” he said. “Most weren’t coffee drinkers. Most had a soda once or twice a week.”
Coffee’s caffeine content varies greatly. Most average-size cups contain 160 milligrams. But a 16-ounce cup of Starbucks coffee packs 330 milligrams of caffeine.
A dose of at least 200 milligrams of caffeine was needed to enhance memory consolidation, the researchers said.
For the study, which was published online Jan.­12 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the researchers asked the participants to look at hundreds of common, everyday images on a computer screen: shoes, a chair, a rubber duck, etc.
“We asked them to tell us if it was an indoor or an outdoor object, but we didn’t really care about what they said,” Yassa said. “We just wanted them to attend to the object, to get that object into their brains.”
Five minutes after the participants looked at the images, half were given 200 mg of caffeine and half received a placebo. They returned 24 hours later, after the caffeine was out of their system, and looked at more images of objects. They were asked to label the pictures as either old, new or similar to the original images they’d seen (for example, a picture of a duck they viewed the day before, but taken from a slightly different angle).
People who had taken the caffeine were better at distinguishing the similar pictures from the original ones, and those who had received the placebo were more likely to incorrectly identify the similar images as the old images, the researchers said.
Yassa said the caffeine-induced ability to recognize similar, but not identical, images did not occur when people were given smaller doses of caffeine or when caffeine was ingested an hour before the picture test.
“On caffeine, the participants were more likely to identify the similar items correctly as similar and not old,” he said. “In doing so, This demonstrates that the caffeine enhanced the brain’s consolidation process — the process of making those items more permanent in their memory,” Yassa said.
The idea, Yassa said, is that outside the lab, you could have the same benefit from your caffeine habit.
“It might allow you to remember things —to retain memories —for a longer period of time and with more precision, even if you eliminate the other benefits of caffeine, like attention, alertness and vigilance,” Yassa said.
Dr. David Knopman, a professor of neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said the results are interesting from a pharmacologic perspective. “Taking it at face value, it’s interesting research,” Knopman said. “It raises some questions about what’s involved in learning and how certain drugs might enhance learning in normal people.”
But Knopman said he doesn’t think the finding has any practical significance for people with memory loss due to Alzheimer’s disease.
Yassa, who also studies aging and Alzheimer’s, said more research is needed to figure out why caffeine might enhance memory.
The study didn’t actually prove that caffeine improves memory, however. One limitation of the study is that participants knew they were involved in caffeine research, the researchers said.
In the United States, 80 percent of adults consume caffeine every day, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Vin Diesel back in the sound booth

Vin Diesel has shared a first glimpse at his work in the recording booth for 'Guardians of the Galaxy,' providing the voice of the extra-terrestrial sentient tree Groot.
Given that the character is known for only being able to utter a single phrase in English - 'I Am Groot' - one does have to wonder how much Diesel needs the sheet of script in front of him...
[Vin Diesel officially cast in Guardians of the Galaxy]
Diesel's Facebook page has long since become a hotbed of 'Guardians of the Galaxy' news. It was here that the actor himself kick-started the rumours linking him to Groot, by posting a photograph of the larger-than-life Marvel Comics character.
Despite months of rumours, Diesel was only officially confirmed for the role in December - and again, he marked this with a photograph.
Now, Diesel has used Facebook to point out a link between 'Guardians of the Galaxy' and an earlier piece of voice work which remains quite probably the most praised performance of the actor's career.
Alongside the image of himself in the booth, Diesel notes "Some of you may remember the character I voiced back in 1998…
"Last month I had the opportunity to voice a new character, on the Disney lot… and I was shocked to see the same sound engineer, Doc, who was there when Brad Bird was directing me 15 years earlier, as the Iron Giant.
"As artists we are susceptible to clocking omens... and this was a great sign."
Engineer Doc Kane has been in the business for 30 years, clocking up well over 300 screen credits, as well as being Oscar-nominated for his work on 'Beauty and the Beast,' 'Aladdin,' and Brad Bird's other animated movies 'The Incredibles' and 'Ratatouille.'
[First official image of Guardians of the Galaxy ]
It was noted by Comic Book Movie that Diesel concluded the post by declaring "This summer's Guardians of the Galaxy, is not only going to blow you away, it could very well break Marvel records. Grateful for the opportunity to make magic."
However, this he has since edited this to simply say the film is "going to blow you away."
And well he might. While hopes are certainly high that 'Guardians of the Galaxy' will prove a worthy addition to the Marvel movie universe, all bets are off as to how it will perform at the box office.
However this latest ambitious Marvel movie goes down, we might keep in mind that this may not be the only role Diesel will portray for the studio. Rumours persist he may still be in line for the cosmic super-villain Thanos, teased by the ending of 'Avengers Assemble' and expected to be the big bad of the third 'Avengers' movie.
Do you think Diesel is a good fit for Groot? Think he was right or wrong to suggest that 'Guardians of the Galaxy' could be one of Marvel's biggest movies yet? Sound off in the comments below.
Ben Bussey is a freelance writer and comic book movie/sci-fi fantasy/horror enthusiast. He considers 'The Iron Giant' to be far and away the best thing Vin Diesel has ever done, and hopes his work as Groot will come close to recapturing that vibe.

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler: Dream Golden Globes double act

For many of their 71 years, the Golden Globes have been mostly thought of as not too much more than a big party and a kind of vague pointer to the Oscars, where the real business is.

But with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler presenting, the Hollywood Foreign Press' awards are rapidly becoming a piece of genuine television entertainment in their own right.
Indeed, such was quality of the wit of the two hosts, the award ceremony should be nominated for some sort of writing gong itself next year.
Fey and Poehler, who have a long-standing friendship and have worked together for years on Saturday Night Live, were dazzling on a night when, curiously, many of the other stars seemed to be suffering a collective bout of stage fright.
Maybe they knew whatever they said, it was going to face a fierce struggle to match the quality of Fey and Poehler's lines.

The opening dialogue was illustrative, crammed with great one-liners. Fey was straight off with: "Good evening to everyone in the audience and to all the women and gay men watching at home."

"We're going to get this done in three hours - or as Martin Scorsese calls it, act 1," she continued.
Poehler followed up with a comment on Netflix's hugely successful year: "Enjoy it while it lasts Netflix, because you're not going to feel so smug in a couple of years when Snapchat is up here accepting best drama."
Then a genuine showstopper of a line from Fey - that Gravity was "the story of how George Clooney would rather float away into space and die than spend one more minute with a woman his own age".
The audience, especially Clooney's co-star Sandra Bullock, was in hysterics. Showbiz journalist Boyd Hilton tweeted it was the funniest monologue joke he'd ever heard.
The crackers kept coming - introducing the star of The Wolf Of Wall Street, Fey urged: "Like a supermodel's vagina, let's say hello to Leonardo DiCaprio."
It was a line typical of the style of humour the pair deploy so well - funny but not fawning, clever but not caustic.
In contrast, there were comparatively few good lines from the rest of Hollywood's stars, although Jim Carrey got some good laughs with: "Dying is easy, comedy is hard. I believe it was Shia LaBeouf who said that."
The Golden Globes are generally a much more relaxed affair than the Oscars, but Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Adams and even veteran Jon Voight struggled to contain their emotions after picking up awards, all admitting to feeling strangely nervous.
However, as the evening wore on things got considerably more relaxed, signified by Emma Thompson arriving with her shoes in one hand and a martini glass in the other to present the award for best screenplay.
Cate Blanchett, collecting the award for best actress, admitted during the night she had been plied with vodka "in the same way Judy Garland was plied with barbiturates".