Bardem earns Golden Globe nomination

17 December 2007

MADRID – Actor Javier Bardem has been nominated for a Golden Globe award, further proof that his Hollywood stock is soaring. Handed out by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, these prizes are considered a reliable indicator of who will win the Academy Awards a couple of months later.

Bardem, 38, will compete against Casey Affleck, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Travolta and John Wilkinson for the Best Actor in a Supporting Role award, for his work in No Country For Old Men, by the Coen brothers.

On Monday, the New York Film Critics Circle awarded Bardem the Best Supporting Actor prize for the same role, confirming that the Spanish actor has a strong chance of receiving an Oscar nomination this year.

In the film – a thriller based on a Cormac McCarthy novel and co-starring Tommy Lee Jones and Woody Harrelson – Bardem plays Anton Chigurh, a murderous psychopath who kills his way across Texas in the 1970s.

First known abroad for his role as the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas in Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls (for which he received an Oscar nomination, becoming the first Spaniard to run for Best Actor), Bardem is known for taking on diverse roles, including that of a middle-aged quadriplegic in Alejandro Amenábar’s The Sea Inside, which also earned him a Golden Globe nomination in 2005.

Meanwhile, Spain’s Alberto Iglesias was nominated for a Golden Globe for the soundtrack of Marc Forster’s The Kite Runner, about an Afghan man who returns home from the US to help out an old friend.

Iglesias was nominated for an Oscar in 2006 for his work in The Constant Gardener. He has also written the score or participated in the music of several Pedro Almodóvar films such as Bad Education, Talk to Her, All About My Mother and The Flower of My Secret.

The 65th Golden Globe Awards will be handed out at a ceremony in Los Angeles on Sunday 13 January. This year the prestigious prizes will pay special tribute to Steven Spielberg.

Subject: Spanish news