With the 74th Golden Globe statuettes distributed, several key winners in acting categories, as well as the writer of "La La Land," could be in line to benefit at film awards season's culmination, the Academy Awards, in February.
Voting members of the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards might have no official overlap, but the Globes' Hollywood Foreign Press Association has become an early predictor of several high profile Oscar categories.
Not because members of the HFPA can vote at the Oscars. Rather, unlike voters at the Producers, Directors, Writers and Screen Actors guild awards, they can't: the association's 90 or so members represent news outlets in 55 countries.
By contrast, Oscars delivered at the annual Academy Awards ceremony are decided upon by members of the invitation-only Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a 6,600-member association of film industry professionals whose perspective on film-making is from the inside-out.
Nevertheless, the HFPA has been consistently reliable in mirroring future Academy picks in several key categories.
Over the last 15 years, the Oscars' own best actresses were already Golden Globe winners an astonishing 93 per cent of the time.
Likewise, the Academy's best actors and best supporting actors have arrived on the back of a Golden Globe win 80 per cent of the time; some 87 per cent of Globe-winning scriptwriters have also then received an Oscar.
That's good news for the 2017 Globes' best drama actor Casey Affleck ("Manchester by the Sea,") best comedy or musical pairing Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone ("La La Land,") and supporting actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson ("Nocturnal Animals,") as well as "La La Land" writer (and director) Damien Chazelle.
Affleck can even be considered more likely than Gosling to win the Oscar's Best Actor as the Academy has most frequently preferred drama to musicals or comedies.
This year might be an exception, especially if "La La Land" momentum has spread to the usually decisive Screen Actors Guild awards.
The fact that France's Isabelle Huppert was the Globes' surprise Best Actress in a Drama (for "Elle") doesn't prevent her from a rare foreign actress Oscar win either. Marion Cotillard achieved the same one-two in 2008 for "La Vie en Rose," and without a Screen Actors Guild award in between, a trophy for which Huppert has not even been nominated.
Ultimately, though, that's what it all comes down to -- nominations. Everything will become much clearer once the Academy Award nominations are announced on January 12; voting takes place between February 13 and 21, ahead of an awards ceremony on February 26, 2017.
