LOS ANGELES — Leonardo DiCaprio, still chasing his first Oscar victory, edged closer to Hollywood's top laurels on Thursday, as he took a Golden Globe nomination for his performance in Alejandro González Iñárritu's "The Revenant," a bloody frontier drama that was also nominated for best drama and best director.
But the big winner in the movie categories was "Carol," which took a nomination for best drama, along with a best director nomination for Todd Haynes, acting nominations for Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, and a nomination for best score. "The Big Short," a late entry in the race, took nominations for two actors, Christian Bale and Steve Carell, for its script, and for best picture in the musical or comedy category.
They led the way for a small group of leading prize contenders that included "The Revenant," "The Martian," also from Fox; "Joy," yet another Fox film; and "Spotlight," from Open Road Films.
Streaming services dominated the nominees for best television comedy, with series from Hulu, Amazon and Netflix picking up nominations, while HBO had its usual strong showing and ABC's "American Crime" picked up several nods.
A best drama and a best director nomination for George Miller's "Mad Max: Fury Road" brought that film out of the pack, toward the front of the seasonal contenders.
In the first round of Golden Globes honors, best screenplay nominations went to "Room," "Spotlight," "The Big Short," "Steve Jobs" and "The Hateful Eight."
Best animated feature nominations went to "Anomalisa," "The Good Dinosaur," "Inside Out," "The Peanuts Movie" and "Shaun the Sheep."
Notwithstanding David O. Russell's "Joy," a dramedy that stars Jennifer Lawrence as the inventor of the Miracle Mop, it so far has been a fairly joyless film season. Picture after picture has come up short — "Steve Jobs," "Everest," "Our Brand Is Crisis," "Freeheld," "Truth" and "Crimson Peak" were among the underperformers — leaving those who grant awards, including the Hollywood Foreign Press Association with its Globes, to close the enthusiasm gap.
Among smaller films, "Spotlight" has beaten the gloom. After well-received festival appearances in Venice; Telluride, Colorado; and Toronto, the newspaper drama about The Boston Globe's investigation of child abuse and a Catholic Church cover-up, has done well in a relatively confined theatrical release, and now has a shot at the top Oscar.
On Wednesday, the closely watched Screen Actors Guild nominations shook up the awards race by ignoring supposed prize favorites like "Steve Jobs," "Carol," "The Revenant" and "Joy" in its closely watched best feature film ensemble category. Instead, nominations went to some less-expected contenders, including "Trumbo," "Straight Outta Compton" and "The Big Short."
In the Globe nominations, notable snubs were dealt to Johnny Depp, who had been considered a strong bet as best dramatic actor for "Black Mass," a film that took no nominations. Steven Spielberg's "Bridge of Spies" also had a disappointing showing, capturing only a nomination for Mark Rylance, as supporting actor.
None of the actors from "Spotlight" were nominated, though the film's cast — which includes Liev Schreiber, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Michael Keaton — had just been nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award.
Among the major studio films, Ridley Scott's "The Martian," a 3-D blockbuster starring Matt Damon as a kind of Robinson Crusoe on Mars, has been buoyed both by a strong audience response, and perhaps by a sense that Scott, like DiCaprio, is overdue for honors.
Neither has won an Oscar, and a victory for either at the Globes ceremony on Jan. 10 might point toward a good night at the Academy Awards seven weeks later. (Scott has never won a Globe. DiCaprio was a winner in the best musical or comic actor category last year, for "The Wolf of Wall Street," and in 2005 was the Globes' best dramatic actor for "The Aviator," but got no Oscar.)
Thursday morning's nominations announcement came barely a week after a mass terror shooting in San Bernardino, California, about 70 miles east of Beverly Hills. There was no mention of the attack. But an earlier mass attack in Paris had already clouded festivities at the Governors Awards ceremony of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in November, where questions about propriety, sobriety and vulnerability were in the air.
The somber mood, if it holds, will add to the challenge before Ricky Gervais, the acid-tongued comic, who will return as host of the Globes ceremony in January. World events aside, Gervais will be fronting a particularly somber set of films, many of them based on real stories with dark edges.
"Concussion" is about brain injuries in the National Football League. "Bridge of Spies" is about the legal defense of a captured Soviet spy during the Cold War. "Truth" is about journalistic failure — whether that of CBS, or its disgraced anchor, Dan Rather — during the 2004 presidential election.
Then there is "The Revenant," which finds DiCaprio as the real-life frontiersman Hugh Glass, trekking through the high Rockies on a mission of vengeance in a film that proves only a little shorter than Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight," a three-hour western.
As for winners, at least one has already been named: The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has said that Denzel Washington will receive its Cecil B. DeMille Award, for his overall contribution to the entertainment industry.