BEVERLY HILLS:

The winners and losers of a strike-hit Golden Globes will be announced on January 13 with romantic drama Atonement facing stiff competition from a crop of blood-soaked rivals.

Atonement leads the field for the 65th edition of the Globes with seven nominations including best drama, best director and acting nods for British stars James McAvoy and Keira Knightley. But the acclaimed adaptation of author Ian McEwan’s best-selling novel must overcome strong challenges from several other films notable for their graphic violence.

Awards season pundits believe that No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen’s masterful thriller is the narrow favourite to take the best drama picture prize.

The film, a faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel of the same name, trails Atonement with four nominations and has built up awards season momentum thanks to a series of honours from US critics groups.

Tom O’Neil, a pundit with the Los Angeles Times’ theenvelope.com, said the Globes best picture prize could hinge on whether voters embrace the Coens’ bleak modern noir over the epic sweep of Atonement. “No Country has been sweeping all the early awards among the critics, so it seems to be the industry favourite,” O’Neil said. “But it’s not typical of the kind of films the Golden Globes have honoured in the past.”

“They tend to like movies like Atonement,” O’Neil added, citing last year’s awards where the moving cross-cultural drama Babel beat Martin Scorsese’s bloody gangster film The Departed for the top prize.

Lew Harris, the editorial director of the Movies.com website, said, “Normally the awards season features a load of warm and fuzzy films that people are cheering for. That hasn’t happened this year. We’ve got a whole load of grim, bloody movies.” The violent the-mes of this year’s drama field could also be mirrored in the Globes best musical/comedy category, wh-ere Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, featuring Johnny Depp as the cut-throat barber of Fleet Street, is favoured to mop up.

Harris said however that the film’s awards aspiration could be threatened by quirky comedy Juno. “Juno could be the sleeper hit of the Globes.” — AFP