Golden Globes’ Jewish winners

LOS ANGELES (JTA) – The size of the Jewish Golden Globe winners’ contingent was slightly more impressive than the modesty of the hourlong newscast.

Daniel Day-Lewis snagged the Best Dramatic Actor Award for his role as a tough oil prospector in “There Will Be Blood.” Day-Lewis is the son of British Jewish actress Jill Balcon. His wife, Rebecca, is the daughter of the late playwright Arthur Miller.

David Duchovny, star of the adult 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 instead went 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.”

Neither Day-Lewis, Duchovny nor other A-list stars in all their finery were on hand Sunday evening to accept their awards because 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 news conference.

Nevertheless, the Golden Globe Awards, conferred by the otherwise insignificant Hollywood Foreign Press Association, are considered an audition of sorts for the prestigious Academy Awards on Feb. 24, so the winners’ names were trumpeted in the media.

Other Jewish winners included Julian Schnabel, the painter and musician, as the 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.

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

Hollywood icon Steven Spielberg was to be honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award, but the presentation was postponed to next year.

Among television awards, Jeremy Piven topped the Best Supporting Actor category as the acerbic Hollywood agent Ari Gold in “Entourage.”