As former voting members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association are taking to the courts to wrest back control of the Golden Globes from media mogul Todd Boehly’s Eldridge Industries, the new owners have announced their latest set of nominations to launch this year’s awards season.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s revolutionary revenge thriller, One Battle After Another, leads the pack with 9 nominations, including for best comedy or musical film, best director and stars including Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Chase Infiniti.

Raising the traditional Globes debate about what constitutes a musical or comedy film, it’s up against the latest mind-blowing creation from Yorgos Lanthimos, Bugonia, Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice and two films from Richard Linklater, Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague – neither of which are musicals or particularly comic – and which, together, weren’t enough to secure him a best director nomination.

That will be contested by Anderson, Sinners’ Ryan Coogler, Joachim Trier for Sentimental Value, Guillermo del Toro for Frankenstein, Hamnet’s Chloe Zhao and the Iranian Palme d’Or winner, Jafar Panahi, for It Was Just An Accident. All but one of them are also up for the best screenplay award, suggesting that the new voting body favours auteurs, with only Guillermo del Toro missing out; the sixth screenplay nod went to Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein for Marty Supreme.

Before the reputation of the Golden Globes was trashed by allegations of racism, misogyny and corruption just before the 2021 ceremony, the film awards were seen as a signal of where Oscar voters might be looking, a few weeks later, and it was largely the drama categories, rather than the “musical or comedy” films that influenced the nearly 10,000 voting members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.

This year’s drama nominees include Guillermo del Toro’s remake of Frankenstein – which has a total of 5 nominations, including for Oscar Isaac as the eponymous scientist and Jacob Elordi as his creature. Hamnet, Sinners, Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent and It Was Just An Accident are the other nominees in the category.

Across the two best film categories, 4 of the 12 nominees are also nominated for the non-English language award, in a sign of how the changing voter base – from about 90 LA-based members of the collapsed Hollywood Foreign Press Association to about 300 film journalists from across the world.

But one element of the ceremony remains intact – a tendency to nominate some of the bigger stars for acting awards, even if their films aren’t up for the top awards. At a time that the Golden Globes, under their new ownership, are trying to win back the respect of the industry, it’s all the more important for them to have big names on the red carpet, offering their support. So even though Wicked: For Good isn’t up for a top award, its stars are. And so it is that the acting nominees include Julia Roberts, for After the Hunt, who’s up against Jennifer Lawrence, for Die, My Love, while George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio will be up against each other for Jay Kelly and One Battle After Another, respectively.

A new category has been introduced since the takeover, which will secure even more crowd-pleasing names are on the show, honouring Box Office performance, in which Wicked: For Good features, alongside Brad Pitt’s F1, Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning and Avatar: Fire And Ash – which, even though it hasn’t been released yet, qualifies as it’s predicted to reach the $100m benchmark in US ticket sales. The inclusion of Mission Impossible will be of particular interest, as Tom Cruise famously handed back his Golden Globes to the HFPA during the scandal that prompted the takeover.

As the entertainment industry is increasingly consolidating ownership of its assets under fewer entities, Todd Boehly, whose Eldridge Industries now owns the Golden Globes, also has major shareholdings in the main industry press, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, the Beverly Hilton – the venue where the awards ceremony will take place – Dick Clark Productions, which produces the awards show – and A24, an independent distributor, which has 7 nominations at this year’s awards, including 3 for Marty Supreme and 2 for The Smashing Machine.

But it’s not just the awards changing hands; these nominations come as a battle is hotting up for ownership of one of the biggest – and most successful studios, Warner Brothers. It’s just chosen a takeover bid from Netflix, over Paramount and Universal, but on the very day that Warners has topped the table of major distributors with 16 Golden Globe nominees, Paramount – which secured only 1 – has launched a hostile bid for its rival.

To increase the public interest and the PR boost that comes from the backing of big names, the new-look Golden Globes are keeping up the tradition of honouring TV shows at the same time as films, with many familiar shows making a return, such as The White Lotus, Slow Horses, Abbott Elementary, Hacks, The Bear and Only Murders in the Building. Some newer showers are also in the mix this year, including Adolescence, The Beast in Me and The Girlfriend.

More big names from the world of TV, who’ll be up for awards, include Dame Helen Mirren for Mobland, Sir Gary Oldman for Slow Horses, Jude Law for Black Rabbit.

The TV awards also provide an opportunity for a number of actors to be up for more than one award themselves; Jeremy Allen White is up for best actor in a film drama for his depiction of Bruce Springsteen and for his role in the TV comedy The Bear, while Jacob Elordi, who has a supporting actor nomination for playing Frankenstein’s monster is also up for best male actor in a limited series for The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

And in a further appeal to younger audiences, the Globes are trying to break new ground by adding a podcast category to their shortlist for the first time. Amy Poehler, Dax Shepard and Mel Robbins are among the nominees.

The winners will be announced on 11th January from the following list of nominees.