Marriage Story and The Irishman deserve awards love, but no Greta Gerwig is heart-sinking

The all-male directors nomination list is dismaying in an awards announcement that has done well by the wonderful Marriage Story

Assessing awards season for snubs has become a favoured form of critical jiu-jitsu in recent years, and maybe it is too easy when a five-strong nomination list in any category inevitably has to miss people out.

But it is a little bit heart-sinking that the Golden Globes 2020 list of best director nominees is an all-male affair, with Greta Gerwig’s direction of Little Women not making the cut, and not making it on to the all-male best screenplay nomination list either.

The frontrunner is Noah Baumbach’s seductively gorgeous and lacerating Marriage Story, with six nods. It is very funny and serves up the delicious confectionery of insider showbusiness politics – although it is actually credited in the serious “drama” category, not comedy. It is a wonderful film: smart, intelligent, humorous film-making for grownups, although perhaps it should be conceded that the lives involved are on a higher and more rarefied material level than the film quite admits. Divorce is a brutally expensive affair on the basic financial level, but no one in the film is shown getting any poorer than they were.

In the silver medal position is The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s monumental late-period mob movie about Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, a Philadelphia hitman rumoured to have had something to do with the mysterious disappearance of the Teamsters’ union boss Jimmy Hoffa in 1975. It’s a minor-key mob epic; a movie about mobsters growing old, about our favourite actors famed for mob roles getting old, and about getting old generally.

The Irishman has five nods but very oddly, no best actor nomination for Robert de Niro as Sheeran, which I think is a shame. What a colossally impressive film it is, made with such amplitude, such authorial confidence, such artistry. Coming up jointly with The Irishman is Quentin Tarantino’s dazzling, provocative, sensual and brilliant Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: a superb film; a thrilling and disturbing black comedy.

As for the box-office smash Joker, the Batman-villain origin story gets four nominations. I am in a minority (though not a minority of one) in finding it a shallow, ugly, boorish film, stridently but incorrectly convinced of its own coolness, and with a decent but not great lead performance from Joaquin Phoenix, who has been better in so many things. The crass and unearned allusions to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy are just reminders of how much better those films were.

Among the rest, The Two Popes is doing very well with four nominations – it could be this year’s Green Book, and I intend that comparison with my fingers almost falling away from the keyboard in ennui. The Two Popes is a gentle, lenient and indulgent bro comedy (or perhaps fantasy) about Pope Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins) handing over the Papacy to the supposedly more liberal Pope Francis I (Jonathan Pryce). It is a nice film, sure, but determinedly indulgent, conjuring a personal and theological happy ending which I’m not sure exists in real life.

But it is Marriage Story, the sweet, sad story of love’s mortality, which has surged ahead in the Golden Globes.