5 Favorite Golden Globe Nominations

As you may have heard, the annual Golden Globe nominations were announced yesterday, for better or worse depending on who you've been rooting for this awards season.

One thing I'll say, is that the Golden Globes are always the most exciting, bat crazy awards show. They've long eclipsed the Screen Actors Guild and Emmys in relevancy, and honestly, have some better choices than the Oscars in most cases. Last year they made history for nominating the incredible Ava DuVernay for Best Director, the first black woman ever nominated for the award. Oscar did not follow suit. In fact, if you look at their slate of nominees and winners last year, a lot of them are better than what Oscar ultimately picked.

This year's awards race is honestly all over the place, and while the Globes did a better job than SAG at forming a consensus, I still couldn't tell you what films have the edge at this point. But confusion aside, there are some really good nominations here, five of which really stood out to me.

Second Round of Critics' Awards: Consensus Forming (Kind Of)

The Boston, Los Angeles and New York Online critics all revealed the winners of their awards today. This follows the announcements from the National Board of Review, New York Film Critics Circle and the Gotham Awards.

There's no one film that's dominating the Best Picture prizes in the way that "Boyhood" did last year, but it's worth noting that "Carol" cleaned up with the NYFCC, and "Mad Max" is finding wide support despite being a summer film. If there's anything these critics prizes are telling us, it's that there's a lot of love for a lot of different films. It's still anyone's game to win at this point.

Take a look at the winners from all three groups below.

First Round of Industry & Critics' Awards: What Do They Tell Us?

It's that time of the year. After consistent guessing and predicting, we are finally starting to get a look at what films truly have the heat going into the Oscar race... at least for right now.

With the Independent Spirit Awards announcing their nominees last week, the Gotham Awards awarding their winners a few days ago, and now announcements from The National Board of Review and The New York Film Critics Circle, things are starting to fall in place... well sort of.

To be fair, these precursors do not decide the Oscars. If you remember back in 2010 when "The Social Network" won every critics award for Best Picture there was, and then went on to lose the Producer's Guild, SAG Ensemble Award and the Oscar, that fact is all too clear in your mind. But again, why these awards are important is because they show what films have heat and what films don't. They can sometimes translate into Oscar success ("The Artist" in 2011, for example) but in a mixed bag of a year like this one, where there is no clear consensus, it's a total toss up.

So, let's examine the first round of winners, shall we?

"Mad Max" is the Movie the Summer Needed

Movies that come out during the summer get a lot of undeserved flack. Despite being some of the most anticipated films being released in the year, they've gotten a reputation for being brainless, loud, big budget affairs that are meant to entertain the masses and nothing else (as if that's such a bad thing). Then again, when the marketplace is flooded with seemingly endless Marvel sequels, it's sort of hard not to get bored with what feels like the same thing over and over again.

Enter "Mad Max: Fury Road", a film that's buzz has been deafening since it premiered out of competition at Cannes at the start of the festival. Though technically it is the fourth installment in the "Mad Max" series, there hasn't been a film in 30 years, so it wouldn't be incorrect to say that this is a reboot of sorts. Though it checks every 'summer film' box (huge budget, action/explosions, etc) this is not your average summer film. Though "Mad Max" provides nonstop thrills throughout its brisk two hour running time, there are underlying themes of female empowerment that challenge what we've come to expect from a standard blockbuster, and the medium of film in general.