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Friday January 18, 2008

Jews have good showing at pared down Globes

by tom tugend
jta

los angeles | The number of Jewish Golden Globe winners was slightly more impressive than the modesty of the hour-long newscast Jan. 13, with two half Jews, Daniel Day-Lewis and David Duchovny, helping to up the score.

Day-Lewis snagged the best dramatic actor award for his role as a tough oil prospector in “There Will Be Blood.” He is the son of British Jewish actress Jill Balcon, but was baptized in an Anglican Church. His wife, Rebecca, is the daughter of the late Jewish playwright Arthur Miller.

Neither Day-Lewis nor any other A-list stars in all their finery were in attendance to accept their awards, in view of the writers strike against major film and television studios. Their absence reduced the customary three-hour blowout to a drab reading of names at a press conference.

Duchovny, star of the Showtime sitcom “Californication,” was selected best actor in a musical or comedy series.

Duchovny, whose father is Jewish, told reporters that he had been too nervous to listen to the results and went instead to a movie.

“I knew if my phone was ringing when I walked into my hotel room that I would have won,” he said. “And it was. Nobody calls a loser.”

The Golden Globe Awards, conferred by the otherwise insignificant Hollywood Foreign Press Association, are considered a kind of audition for the Oscars on Feb. 24, and the winners’ names were trumpeted in the media.

Other Jewish winners were:

n Julian Schnabel, the painter and musician, won as director of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” The film, about a stroke victim who can communicate only by blinking his left eyelid, also won top foreign language film honors for France and the United States.

n Brothers Ethan and Joel Coen were awarded best screenplay kudos for the thriller “No Country for Old Men.”

n Among television awards, Jeremy Piven topped the best supporting actor category as acerbic Hollywood agent Ari Gold in “Entourage.”

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