Nominations 2017

"This was the biggest thing I’ve ever done so it was quite daunting in the beginning.   The big challenge with playing fantasy is that you have to make it truthful and make the audience believe that that’s actually real and could be possible.

Mahershala Ali, Moonlight. When Juan, a feared drug dealer ruling over a mean corner in a tough Miami neighborhood, comes across a scared, trembling kid in the opening scenes from director Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, the audience does not expect the layers of care and tenderness that frame the encounter.

Based on the 1973 Michael Crichton movie of the same name, Westworld focuses on a Western-inspired theme park which is populated by ‘hosts,’ androids that cater to every whim of the guests that visit it.   No fantasy is too far-out to be fulfilled, no storyline taboo.

An ensemble show about a family and their relationships, loves and lives that flashes back and forward in time.   A couple expecting triplets has one stillborn child, and ends up adopting an abandoned child that appears in the hospital at the same time.

A young boy disappears from the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana under mysterious circumstances.   His distraught mother, friends and the town cops all begin a massive manhunt for him, but as the title suggests, things are not straightforward.

This is the sixth nomination for the HBO series which is the most downloaded show in the world.   Based on the fantasy novels by George R.

The 10-episode first season which airs on Netflix is created and written by Peter Morgan, Golden Globe winner for Best Screenplay for The Queen, and nominee for the same award for Frost/Nixon.   The show starts with Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to Prince Philip in 1947 and follows the lives of the royals up to her coronation as Queen Elizabeth II, on to 1955.

Viola Davis, Fences. Reprising the role she played on Broadway opposite Denzel Washington, Viola Davis is a quiet storm of determination, anger and devotion as Rose, the wife of the hard-headed, short-tempered Troy (played again by Denzel Washington, who directed the film from a script by playwright August Wilson).

Who really is Ray Marcus, Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s character in director Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals? Beyond the fact that he pops up in the pages of a book that Susan/Amy Adams avidly reads during most of the film, the less we say about it the better. Taylor-Johnson, however, is very precise in his description: “It was a character that I didn't instantly relate to, you know?”, he told us.

As the grown-up Saroo, the Indian boy adopted by an Australian family in director  Garth Davis’ Lion, Dev Patel found himself on a journey very similar to his own. “This is probably the project that I had the biggest personal connection t”, Dev Patel told us.