"Butler" "Wolf" hit Golden Globes snub

Biggest surprises include Daniel Bruhl and Idris Elba

This year’s Golden Globe nominations were unveiled Thursday and the omissions of Oprah Winfrey, Martin Scorsese and Forest Whitaker from the list of contenders represent the awards’ biggest snubs, according to a Fandango survey of moviegoers.

There were happy surprises in addition to nasty shocks, the online ticketer reports. Among the inclusions that moviegoers hadn’t expected, but were pleased to see were Best Supporting Actor nods to “Captain Phillips”s’ Barkhad Abdi and “Rush”s’ Daniel Bruhl, as well as a Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama nomination for Idris Elba in “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.”

“Barkhad Abdi must be pinching himself to get a Globe nod over the likes of George Clooney, Harrison Ford, and Tom Hanks for his first film acting job,” Fandango Chief Correspondent Dave Karger toldTheWrap.

See photos: Golden Globes 2013: The Nominees 

Fandango polled more than a thousand moviegoers to get its results.

Winfrey, who was widely expected to make the cut for her work as an alcoholic homemaker in “Lee Daniels’ The Butler,” topped the list of snubs, earning 41 percent of the vote. In the second slew, well behind the talk-show icon was Scorsese, who has earned rapturous reviews for directing the high finance bacchanal “The Wolf of Wall Street,” but was passed over this year. He earned 23 percent of the vote.

Other snubs included Whitaker’s upright manservant in “The Butler” (11 percent), Tom Hanks’ channeling of Walt Disney in “Saving Mr. Banks” (10 percent) and the late James Gandolfini’s performance as a sweet-natured divorced dad in “Enough Said” (9 percent). Hanks could at least content himself with the Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama nomination he earned for “Captain Phillips,” which should ease the sting from being overlooked.

Abdi, who scored a Globe nod for his debut role as a Somali pirate, was the happiest surprise for 24 percent of voters, followed by Elba, whose nomination for his work as the anti-apartheid icon, was the choice of 22 percent of voters. Bruhl’s arrogant race car driver earned 21 percent of the vote, followed by “Before Midnight”s’ Julie Delpy with 15 percent and “Frances Ha’s” Greta Gerwig with eight percent.

The poll is tied to the launch of the second season of Fandango’s original video series,“Frontrunners,” which features Karger interviewing top awards contenders such as “12 Years a Slave” stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” star and director Ben Stiller and “Fruitvale Station” star Octavia Spencer.

Like all good magic, romance builds slow: Hugo

This is definitely one of those cases where your patience will be rewarded.

Martin Scorcese's "departure form Gangland" doesn't seem like much for the first 30 minutes or so. Till that time, the easily grasped plot and sub-plots are stretched almost beyond tolerance; having lost his clockmaker father (Jude Law, making the most of his limited minutes), a boy in 1930s Paris ends up in the train station winding the clocks that direct the trains around which revolve the lives of the extraordinary and the also-rans.

But, he has something else. Hidden away in his gear-filled home is an automaton (wind-up man) bequeathed to him by his father, but in need of repair, in particular the insertion of a heart-shaped wind-up key. This particular metaphor preety much becomes a motif for the entire film, which is considerably enlivened by the presence of  Sasha Baron Cohen as the autocratic yet insecure station inspector (rounding up other orphans and hotly pursuing Hugo); Oscar-winner Ben Kingsley in the role of the crotchety real-life cinema pioneer George Mellies, ruined by WWI and largely forgotten, and most of all, the luminescent Chloe Grace Moretz as Mellies' ward (thus also an orphan) and Hugo's "love interest" in the film - at least as far as pre-teen characters are allowed to have love interests.

The real love letter is revealed though, through a stirring collection of clips, to be Scorcese's, directed at the cinema itself. Through the play of the story, we see George Lloyd's famous "clock-hanging" scene (further recreated by Hugo himself), the Lumiere Brothers early clips, including the train arriving at the station (the train becomes a metaphor in another, more harrowing way, but watch the film for that) and recreations of Mellies famed glass studio and his own pieces.

It looks and feels like magic, but  of course, its partly borrowed, and it may come a little too late amid all the chases and the hand-holding to satisfy some viewers. There's no denying however, that like the wind-up man, the picture turns a few neat little tricks when set on its own.