Golden Globe Awards

In 2009, 47-year-old Samuel Maoz was the first Israeli to win the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival with his directorial debut Lebanon. His second film, Foxtrot, was awarded the Silver Lion this year.

Nominee, Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture (The Florida Project)Willem Dafoe grew up in Appleton, Wisconsin, “a quiet, conservative paper mill town” during the “Eisenhower era,” from a large middle-class family with two older brothers and five sisters, his mother was a nurse, his father a surgeon, “and both my parents worked, he says, so I was very free and a little mischievous. ” “I was a God-fearing straight kid, but I knew I wanted to become an actor, which seemed an unrealistic aspiration, because nobody I knew made their living that way.

It was a double en plein at the awards for the third and final episode of the The Lord of the Rings saga -The Return of the King: four  Golden Globe nominations, four wins; 11 Academy Award nominations, 11 wins, an unprecedented feat. The final confrontation between the forces of good and evil fighting for control of Middle-Earth, conquered everything and everybody; Hobbits Frodo (Elijah Wood) and faithful companion Sam (Sean Astin) reach Mordor in their quest to destroy the "one ring", while Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) leads the forces of good against Sauron's evil army.

Sofia Coppola’s poignant relationship comedy had no competition that year. It was unquestionably the best in its field and became a strong contender for the Oscar as well.

In an impressive one-two punch, Nicole Kidman won the Golden Globes for Best Actress, Drama for The Hours, just a year after besting the corresponding Comedy/Musical category with her performance in Moulin Rouge!. Never mind Kidman was almost unrecognizable under a prosthetic nose and other makeup effects in the role of novelist Virginia Woolf: she was the actress of the moment.

For the first time in almost 40 years, a musical wins both the Golden Globe and the Academy Award as the best film of the year. The previous winner: The Sound of Music.

The Hollywood Foreign Press embraced Baz Luhrmann’s one-of-a-kind musical like no other, and their support catapulted the movie to box office heights and an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. The film had many adherents among them Robert Wise and Stanley Donen, who proclaimed that director Luhrmann had reinvented the Hollywood musical.

All in all, it was a good night for the Aussies: Russell Crowe won his Golden Globe for Best Actor – Drama for A Beautiful Mind, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge triumphed as Best Musical or Comedy and was good for a Best Actress – Comedy Globe for Nicole Kidman as well. Directed by Ron Howard, A Beautiful Mind tells the story of Princeton mathematician John Nash (Crowe), who won a Nobel Prize for Economics after years of struggling with schizophrenia.

Ridley Scott's Gladiator revamped the sword-and-sandal epic genre of a past era in Hollywood and cemented Russell Crowe as an international superstar and sex-symbol. It was basically a revenge story in ancient Rome: when Roman General Maximus is betrayed by Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), he is forced into a painful exile, and eventually returns to Rome as a gladiator and seeks vengeance with all his might.

A new millennium and a new force in filmdom.  Dreamworks, a studio created only a few years back by Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg would go on to win three consecutive best picture Golden Globes and Academy Awards.