(1) Although it never really has a sense of fun and burns with ill-focused anger, The Paperboy represents a kind of triumph, surely, even if it's just in getting such high-profile actors to do such low-down deeds.
(2) There is a reason for this and it is not merely the deeply ingrained tribal loyalty of a boy who still remembers the thrill of his first visit to the Stretford End or the tingle of excitement when offered a job as a paperboy by a former United star (in those days retired footballers had to work for a living).
(3) More surprises included a nod for Nicole Kidman as best supporting actress for her role in The Paperboy, and Richard Gere as best actor for Arbitrage.
(4) Meryl Streep is nominated for her simpering turn in the dreadful Hope Springs and Nicole Kidman for her high-camp car-crash in The Paperboy (the centrepiece of which involves her urinating over an insensible Zac Efron ).
(5) Now is not the time to rage against the Globes' lack of taste or good sense (that moment came last month, when The Master was barred from the best film shortlist and Nicole Kidman found herself nominated for The Paperboy).
(6) His recent films have either cast him against type – as in The Frozen Ground , or The Raven , in which he played Edgar Allan Poe, or 2012, where he battled against sci-fi disaster, or The Paperboy , in which he played another killer (though at least in this one he gets to play telepathic sex games with Nicole Kidman) – or have just slipped below the radar: The Ice Harvest , War Inc , Martian Child .
(7) Photo: Planet Photos Lee Daniels's The Paperboy was something else – though it was the third US movie here to feature a character getting his throat slit.
(8) There was little love for other English language cinema at the festival, including The Paperboy, Lee Daniels's noirish follow-up to Precious, starring an oft nude Nicole Kidman as an unstable woman who has an affair with Zac Efron.
(9) But if you know the name, it's likely from the credits of American films – Jack Reacher and Lincoln , Lee Daniels' The Paperboy and Daniels' new one, The Butler , which just topped an Oscar tipsters' chart of the key films of the 2013-14 awards season.
(10) Nicole Kidman's turn in The Paperboy, which saw her almost unrecognisable as the raddled jailhouse fiancée of a death-row inmate, has arrived from nowhere for a best supporting actress nomination.
(11) Born in 1986 to an accountant and a classroom assistant, he grew up in Norwich and worked as a paperboy and in Sainsbury’s before getting into drama school.