‘Emilia Pérez’ leads Golden Globe nominations, Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet among contenders

Jacques Audiard’s audacious musical Emilia Pérez, about a Mexican drug lord who undergoes gender-affirming surgery to become a woman, led nominations to the 82nd Golden Globes on Monday, scoring 10 nods to lead it over other contenders like the musical smash Wicked, the papal thriller Conclave and the post-war epic “The Brutalist.”

The nominations for the Globes, which will be televised by CBS and streamed on Paramount+ on January 5, were announced on Monday morning by Mindy Kaling and Morris Chestnut.

The embattled Globes, which are no longer presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, are still in comeback mode after years of scandal and organisational upheaval. Working in the Globes favour this year: an especially starry field of nominees. Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet, Angelina Jolie, Daniel Craig, Denzel Washington, Ariana Grande, Glen Powell and Selena Gomez all scored nominations.

The young Donald Trump drama The Apprentice also landed nominations for its two central performances, by Sebastian Stan as Trump and Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn. The president-elect has called “The Apprentice” a “politically disgusting hatchet job’ made by “human scum.”

How much the recent president election will figure into Hollywood’s awards season remains to be seen. In the season’s first awards ceremony, the Gotham Awards, Trump went unmentioned but sometimes alluded to. Stan also received a nomination on Monday for the dark comedy A Different Man.

While Oppenheimer and, to a lesser degree, Barbie, sailed into the Globes nominations last year as the clear heavyweights of awards season, no such front runner has emerged this year. The Globes don’t often align with the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, a much larger group that far more closely reflects the film industry. But they can give films a major boost, and ripe fodder for their awards marketing.