If the absolute loftiest tenets of artistic filmmaking are rarely displayed by those movies nominated for the major English language film awards, then there is still plenty of fun to be gleaned from observing the various contenders trying to time their various Oscar promotional pushes to perfection. The most important precursor to the Academy Awards is probably the Golden Globes, the nominations for which have just been announced.

Pleasingly, the way to the 2012 Globes (due to be dished out on 15 January) is led by Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist, a genuinely terrific throwback to the era of silent filmmaking. Backed by the Weinsteins, those awards season campaigners par excellence, The Artist has scored nominations in most of the main categories: Best Picture (Musical/Comedy), Screenplay, Director, Supporting Actress, and Actor (Musical/Comedy) for Jean Dujardin, who also won the acting prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his turn as fallen screen idol George Valentin.     

There were Best Picture and Best Director nods for another, lesser, silent cinema homage, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, which has already been named Film of the Year by the National Board of Review (before Alvin and the Chipmunks 3 had been released?! Talk about shooting your load too early…).

There was, however, no Best Supporting Nomination for either of Sacha Baron Cohen or Ben Kingsley, who respectively play a conflicted station guard and real-life fantasy filmmaking pioneer Georges Méliès in Scorsese’s movie, and who both also cropped up a few days ago in the disappointing first trailer for the former’s latest exercise in comic bad taste, The Dictator.

Already the hot favourite for the Best Actor Oscar is George Clooney, for his role in Alexander Payne’s The Descendants. Although if he wants to secure the Golden Globe in that category he will have to see off the challenge of Ryan Gosling, nominated for his leading role as a beleaguered media fixer in the glossy-but-enjoyable Clooney-directed Ides of March.

While Gosling was also named in the Best Actor (Comedy/Musical) category for his performance in Crazy, Stupid, Love, there was no love shown for the same actor’s mannered, taciturn showing in stylistic tour de force Drive. Albert Brooks has, however, been justly recognised for his turn as a mobster-cum-film producer in that movie, the veteran writer-director-actor earning himself a Best Supporting Actor nomination.

That category will see Brooks pitted against an even more venerable Hollywood presence, in the shape of Christopher Plummer, nominated for his touching, funny performance in Mike Mills’ Beginners. And in what looks a strong category, Brooks and Plummer face further competition from Kenneth Branagh, by far the best thing in My Week with Marilyn as a by-turns petty and regal Laurence Olivier.

Though this writer was far less impressed with Michelle Williams’ showing in the same film, her Marilyn Monroe is still viewed as a leading Oscar contender, and is definite frontrunner for the Best Actress (Comedy/Musical) Golden Globe – a category in which the ex-Dawson’s Creek star is competing against two actresses from the same movie: Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet, for the Roman Polanski-directed four-hander Carnage.

It seems a tad harsh that Foster and Winslet have been recognised for their roles in the Polanski flick while the obvious scene-stealer in that film, Christoph Waltz, has been overlooked. But there is also perhaps some kind of perverse artistic justice done by the fact that Waltz has been passed over, whereas Viggo Mortensen’s turn as Sigmund Freud in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method has been nominated for Best Supporting Actor – that being a role that Waltz, in the words of Cronenberg, “copped out” of in order to appear in the Hollywood fromage of Water for Elephants, opposite Chin du Jour Robert Pattinson.   

Have you got a filmmaking extravaganza boiling away, which would be a sure-fire awards season smash, if only you could find somewhere to shoot out it? Then why not check out our studio rates, and see if we could help put you on the path to Hollywood glory?