“They loved it when they were in the UK last year,” a source close to the couple told the newspaper. “They like the culture and are happy for their children to receive schooling here. They think Richmond is a beautiful part of the world.”

The couple, along with their six children, has planned to stay in London for at least two years post marriage, as Jolie would be shooting three movies in Britain one after the other.

“Angelina starts work on her next film, Maleficent, in about three weeks so Brad will look after their brood over summer as he won’t start work on the Ridley Scott film until September,” the source said.

According to the report, the Whornes Place in Richmond has caught the eyes of the couple, where Brad was filming horror thriller World War Z.

The exquisite Richmond property seems to be atop the couple’s list after they rented it for $48,540 in 2011.

“Brad and Angelina hold an affection for the UK so this investment makes sense,” the source added.

According to a recent bit, Brangelina will get hitched by this summer at a private chapel near the village of Correns in southern France.

The source confirmed: “No date has been set [for the wedding] yet but they’ll probably go back to their home in France to get married.”

Earlier Friday, we confirmed that the sparkler Jolie wore Wednesday night at a museum event in L.A. is indeed an engagement ring. Robert Procop, the Beverly Hills jeweler and former CEO of Asprey & Garrard, the British jewelry company to the English royal family, said he crafted Jolie’s ring in collaboration with Pitt.

Procop told us: “Brad had a specific vision for this ring, which he realized over a yearlong collaboration. He wanted every aspect of it to be perfect, so I was able to locate a diamond of the finest quality and cut it to an exact custom size and shape to suite Angelina’s hand. Brad was always heavily involved, overseeing every aspect of the creative design evolution. The side diamonds are specially cut to encircle her finger. Each diamond is of the highest gem quality.”

Procop was not just some random choice for Pitt: The jeweler has worked with Jolie as well, designing baubles, the Style of Jolie collection, to benefit the Education Partnership for Children in Conflict.

“I haven’t acted in two years, and I haven’t done anything else since this (Land of Blood and Honey). The next thing I am looking at is a Disney movie,” said the actress.

Disney’s Maleficent is written by Linda Woolverton, who also wrote the script for Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and co-wrote the script for The Lion King. Touted as a modern take on the classic fairy tale, the fantasy is told from the viewpoint of Sleeping Beauty’s fairy godmother, to be played by Jolie. The actress said that she adores screenwriter Linda Woolverton’s revisionist take on the fairy tale and the complex relationship between Maleficent and Sleeping Beauty.

“The best thing to find that balance is to do something that is just for children,” Jolie said in Berlin. “You know, you find different ways to make things matter. When, for example, you do fun action movies, they are empowering for my daughters.”

Disney’s Maleficent will be directed by Robert Stromberg, who previously was the production designer of Avatar, Alice in Wonderland and Disney’s upcoming Oz the Great and Powerful, helmed by Sam Raimi.

This article titled “Brad Pitt on Moneyball, the Oscars – and giving up dope” was written by Jeremy Kay, for The Guardian on Thursday 2nd February 2012 20.00 UTC

Brad Pitt pops his head through the balcony doorway and stage-whispers my name. He bounds round to shake hands and surveys the cauldron below that is Hollywood Boulevard. No fuss. No fanfare. No harried flunkies with clipboards listing the dos and don’ts. Just one of the most recognisable men on the planet in a black jumpsuit and sneakers. And me. And a bodyguard as tall as a sequoia outside the hotel room. “How ya doing?”

And then the deluge. I had heard of Pitt’s lively curiosity, his passion for architecture, philanthropy, his catholic taste in reading material. I didn’t know about the delivery system – a lava flow articulated in a deep, rural drawl: “Who lives there next to the hotel? How shall we arrange the chairs? Is that shorthand? You don’t see that much. How does it work? Ask me anything.”

If Pitt could somehow flit from place to place as easily as he does in conversation, life would be a lot simpler. In fact, mapping a route from point to point is a daily logistical conundrum. “My destinations are determined by parking lots,” he says, fresh-faced, neat-goateed. Today, a warm Friday in late January, he has made the tinted-window dash from the nearby Hollywood Hills compound he shares with Angelina Jolie and their six children.

Three days before, Pitt, 48, received the third and fourth Academy Award nominations of his career, earning recognition as producer and star of Moneyball. The movie took six nominations in all, while Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, in which he also stars, went home with three.

“We’re so defined by the last success or the last failure that we even start to see ourselves that way,” says Pitt. “You’ve got these awards and there’s going to be one winner and four losers, but the four losers made great films. A subtle point of Moneyball is that we’re a string of successes and failures. Odds are I won’t have another year like this one for a while.”

Let’s hope the odds preclude another production history as tortuous as that of Moneyball. Based on Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, the film recounts how baseball team Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane used unorthodox statistics to allow the struggling club to compete with the best. Steven Soderbergh left the project and it took Pitt, one of three producers, five years to get it up and running again. He is quick to praise Sony Pictures for its faith in the project. Uber-producer Scott Rudin is less circumspect. Pitt, Rudin said in a recent interview, “saved it single-handedly”.

Why did he fight for it? “Well,” he says, a lazy grin unfolding across his face. “I just worked on it for so damn long. I’ve been on that end of the experience a couple of times. The main character is a guy who’s been devalued by the sport and is playing what he called an unfair game. And they go up against conventional wisdom and get called heretics in the process. At the end of the day this guy who’s trying to win games is really trying to find his own values.” He laughs. “Come on, man, that’s good stuff.”

When Pitt met Beane he discovered “a funny fucker, sharp as a knife”, who shunned the limelight. “He reminded me of the characters I loved from 70s films. When I started in film I was taught that you had to have a character arc and there had to be an epiphany. As years go by I have found that to be utter bullshit. We don’t really change; we evolve in degrees and what I love about these characters from the 70s like Popeye Doyle is they were the same beast at the end of the film as they were at the beginning. I do love obsessive characters. I get off on watching that.”

Pitt has been in the business for 20 years now. He moved to Los Angeles from Springfield, Missouri, and paid his dues for a couple of years doing commercials and extra work. His first big break came when he played a horny cowboy in Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise in 1991. “That was the first time I was let into the show,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, that’s how I come off.’ I felt it could have had more weight.”

After Thelma and Louise, Pitt became a household name through a string of roles in A River Runs Through It (“the first time I felt pressure”), Kalifornia (“my first attempt at character work”), Interview With the Vampire (“I was miscast”) and Legends of the Fall (“my first lead – they took a gamble on me”). Then he took a year off. “I was waiting to find something really interesting and that wait led me to [David] Fincher and Seven.

“Initially I’d read three pages of the script and put it down. A friend told me to finish it and I did and I met Finch and we were automatically talking the same language. When I got accepted to do Seven I had it written into the contract that the head stays in the box at the end. And that [Pitt's character] kills John Doe. When the premiere ended they flicked on the bright lights too quickly and people got up with this distasteful look on their faces and left. Finch and I looked at each other and said: ‘What have we done?’”

That same year Pitt earned his first Oscar nomination for supporting actor in Twelve Monkeys. “I think I was forced on Terry [Gilliam],” Pitt says with a coy smile. “I got the first half dead-on, but I flunked the second.” He is more scathing about Meet Joe Black, which came out three years later in 1998: “I flatlined in that one.” The reunion with Fincher on Fight Club in 1999 resulted in Tyler Durden, a suitably anarchic end to a tumultuous, star-making decade. “The story was so outrageous … that was just one of those rewarding experiences for all the other difficult ones that preceded it.”

By the end of the 90s, Pitt was awash in the trappings of celebrity but says he hankered after greater focus and fulfilment. “I’d smoked a lot of weed. I was professional at it. I wasn’t participating in life. I was smoking myself into a doughnut, a mollusc. I got disgusted with it.” Then he quit marijuana. “At the end I came to the very simple conclusion that I wanted to make things and be a part of stories that were personal and that I could bring value to and if I got this opportunity, to contribute something to the zeitgeist of film-making.”

The following decade continued to stimulate and, by and large, please the critics. There was a recurring role in Soderbergh’s Ocean franchise, Troy, Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s Babel, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading and a third Fincher film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which resulted in Pitt’s first lead actor Oscar nomination. His five-year marriage to Jennifer Aniston ended shortly after the summer 2005 release of Mr and Mrs Smith, where he met and fell in love with Jolie. “That was a monumental change for more reasons than one. Six plus one, to be exact. I think that film has merit, too. It’s really good fun.”

By the middle of the decade Pitt was flexing his producer muscles. “Instead of sitting there waiting for projects to come in, I wanted to start exploring stories that interested me.” Pitt’s new production company, Plan B, made its first deal, acquiring the script for The Departed, which would go on to win four Oscars, including Martin Scorsese’s first for best director.

Since then Plan B has produced, among others, A Mighty Heart, starring Jolie, Kick-Ass and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, with Pitt in the lead. “Jesse James is absolutely one of my favourites, and I think the more it decants the better it gets,” he says softly. “About three other people think that as well, but I think it’s got legs. It’s elegant. Andrew Dominik is a phenomenal director.”

Pitt reunited with the Australian film-maker last year to play an underworld fixer in Cogan’s Trade. Also on the runway are zombie tale World War Z and a smaller role in Steve McQueen‘s Twelve Years a Slave. “McQueen is the real deal,” he says. “And Fassbender is as good as it gets.” We discuss Fassbender’s prolific workrate and Pitt remarks, “Yeah, it’s like he’s working in the porn industry. He should be, by the way.”

As Pitt pushes 50, his physicality remains, but gone is the mania from his earlier work, in its place a more contemplative kinship with the obsessive characters he seems to feel most affinity towards. Being a producer has allowed him to cheerlead work of personal relevance. Does he think he’s a good actor? “I think I’ve become one,” he says, adding that being a father of six has created the need “not to embarrass myself in front of my kids”.

There are deep reserves of goodwill for Pitt in the industry and recognition that, with Moneyball and The Tree of Life, he has quietly solidified a mighty, eccentric career, one that has embraced with equanimity gems and howlers, box-office smashes and lo-fi treasures. “I’m very sporadic, but I think I’ve got some skills now. What I’m lacking is the weight of some of the actors I like and maybe I’ll focus on that.” He waits a beat, unleashes a killer grin. “I’m so damn affable, it’s disgusting.”

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She paired the black outfit with Ferragamo heels and wore jewelry from the Style of Jolie collection. The collection is reportedly collaboration between Jolie and jewelry designer Robert Procop and features handcrafted pieces in precious gems like emeralds and tourmalines.

It has been reported that all the proceedings from this exclusive collection go to Jolie’s charitable foundation, The Education Partnership for Children of Conflict.

From the collection, Jolie selected a 9.17ct Cushion cut emerald ring mounted in warm 18k rose gold, along with a pair of 17.40ct Cushion cut emerald earrings mounted in rounded 18k rose gold bezels.

Angelina Jolie was given Stanley Kramer Award for her feature directorial debut, “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” a love story set against the backdrop of the Bosnian war.

She paired the black outfit with Ferragamo heels and wore jewelry from the Style of Jolie collection. The collection is reportedly collaboration between Jolie and jewelry designer Robert Procop and features handcrafted pieces in precious gems like emeralds and tourmalines.

It has been reported that all the proceedings from this exclusive collection go to Jolie’s charitable foundation, The Education Partnership for Children of Conflict.

From the collection, Jolie selected a 9.17ct Cushion cut emerald ring mounted in warm 18k rose gold, along with a pair of 17.40ct Cushion cut emerald earrings mounted in rounded 18k rose gold bezels.

Angelina Jolie was given Stanley Kramer Award for her feature directorial debut, “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” a love story set against the backdrop of the Bosnian war.

This article titled “Angelina buys Brad his ideal gift – his very own waterfall” was written by Marina Hyde, for The Guardian on Thursday 5th January 2012 20.00 UTC

Have you any idea how dreary your life is? I can only hope to give you an inkling with the following news: for Christmas, Angelina Jolie gave Brad Pitt a waterfall.

Lost in Showbiz would prefer to leave it at that, but understands you may wish for more detail. So here goes. A few years ago, the couple made a pilgrimage to a site of specific personal interest for Brad – Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania. (Wait – Brad Pitt likes architecture? He certainly doesn’t like to bang on about it.) During that visit, according to Fallingwater’s director, Angelina mentioned to staff that Brad was “so hard to buy for”. But that annual conundrum seems to have been happily resolved, with Angelina opting to buy a northern California waterfall and the land surrounding it for her beloved.

Now, you may already know that the couple have a giant bed – 9ft wide, according to Angelina – but whether she placed the waterfall in a Christmas stocking hung at its foot I cannot say. What is evident, however, is that box sets and scented candles have just been bumped one place further down on the rankings of acceptable Christmas presents – and anyone who doesn’t want to look like they phoned it in next year should begin conducting seismic surveys in areas of outstanding natural beauty today.

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This article titled “Angelina Jolie goes to war” was written by Janine di Giovanni, for The Guardian on Friday 16th December 2011 20.14 UTC

When we meet in a cafe in Budapest, Angelina Jolie has just returned from the Libyan city of Misrata, which sustained one of the bloodiest battles of the civil war. But despite the journey, and what she has seen in the devastated city, she is not rattled. “When I go somewhere, I am always willing to learn about it. I get briefings, I read books, I talk to people,” she says. “But mainly I try to go somewhere to bring awareness, to come home and pick up the phone and call someone and try to get something done.”

She took this focus and directness, this earnest approach, to her directorial debut, In The Land Of Blood And Honey, which opens in the US this month. She told me that when it came to the technicalities of making a film, “I wasn’t afraid to ask the DP [director of photography]. And I listened to my cast, most of whom lived through the war. I listened to their stories and tried to incorporate it into the work.” Against the backdrop of the fighting, she has created a love story about Danijel, a Serbian soldier, and Ajila, the Bosnian woman he re-encounters during the war.

At 3am, after we have talked mainly about the horrors of the Bosnian war – which erupted in the wake of the dismemberment of Yugoslavia in 1991, pitted the nascent countries of Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia against each other along complicated ethnic and religious lines, and left an estimated 100,000 people dead – her bodyguard pops his head in to gently remind us it is late. We’ve been talking and drinking for eight hours; still, she insists on walking me back to my hotel, so I arrive safely. “I want to make sure you’re all right,” she says.

As a journalist who lived through the siege of Sarajevo, I witnessed the ethnic cleansing, the burning of houses, the columns of refugees pouring from the country and, once, a dog running down the street with a human hand in its mouth. I went to see Blood And Honey with an especially critical eye. I was on the lookout for inauthentic details, since other films I’ve seen about Bosnia left me irritated and annoyed: why hadn’t the director done more research? Why couldn’t someone tell the true story of the brutal war in the heart of Europe at the end of the 20th century?

I emerged from Jolie’s screening impressed. How could a woman who was only 17 when the conflict erupted in April 1992 have so captured the horror of a war that focused largely on indiscriminate and brutal attacks on civilians?

“At the time, I had no idea of the extent of the agony,” she admits, describing how it was her later role as an ambassador to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees that exposed her to the plight of the Bosnian civilians and made her want to learn more about the war.

Jolie replicates the city of Sarajevo – which endured the longest-running siege in modern history – exactly as I remember it. The humanitarian trucks being rocketed by Serb gunmen; the young rape victim slowly losing her mind after being held in captivity and repeatedly violated; the drunken snipers targeting a father and son running across a bridge.

Her film depicts the isolation of war. Early on in the fighting, I remember going for a walk, avoiding the Serb snipers near the Jewish cemetery on the hill, to a neighbourhood on the opposite side of the river where I lived. It was a time of intense bombing, sniping, starving and freezing. I had witnessed old people who had been abandoned in their frontline nursing home and died in their beds. I saw kids who got rocketed for building snowmen. At the beginning of the war, America did not want to get involved; it saw the conflict as a European problem. As the fighting spread between Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, the UN got involved, but it was not until Nato air strikes in 1994-95 that the opposing parties were forced to the negotiating table, where the US played a role in bringing about peace.

And yet early on, people hung American flags out of their windows. “Are they coming to save us?” they asked me, tugging at my sleeves. “When are the Americans coming?” Jolie’s film shows what it is like to be one of those people – a poet, a bank clerk, a teacher, a mother – and to be transformed by the cruelty and betrayal of war.

“The people felt as though the world had forgotten them,” Jolie says. “It was a time of great pain, and I wanted to depict how courageous people were – without offending anyone. It was made to remind everybody of the war – but only a small group of people will really understand,” she says. Which is perhaps why she decided to release the film first in the Bosnian language, with English subtitles.

The authenticity of Blood And Honey comes from a team of talented actors from the former Yugoslavia – a mix of Serbs, Muslims and Croats. Some saw the war up close. The leading man, Goran Kostic, comes from a distinguished military family. His depiction of an officer who is forced to commit savage acts against his will is honest and painful. Vanesa Glodjo recalls how she was “shot at many times. But they didn’t get me on my way to school. They wounded me in my own house with the granate [mortar].”

And then there is Ermin Bravo, a young actor who was a child during the siege. During filming he wore the patched, frayed combat trousers that his older brother had actually worn as a Sarajevo defender. Bravo recalled during his audition that he “forgot what a banana tasted like” (people lived on humanitarian aid packages, which largely consisted of rice, pasta, powdered milk and a kind of liquid cheese).

Yet conjuring up memories of a war that everyone wants to forget was not easy for any of them. “The [film shoot] was especially hard for me, as my father fought during the war while I was living with my mum and sister,” Alma Terzic says. Terzic lost 28 members of her family in the fighting. “It was a huge responsibility,” she says. “It was my duty to play it truthfully as much as possible.”

The nuances Jolie brings to the film are equally important. “It was half script, half improvisation,” she says, and she relied heavily on local staff. She understands that many of the Serb gunners were drinking a potent fruit brandy known as slivovitz throughout the war (she shows the commander with a bottle on his desk), and that the safest time to drive down Sniper Alley was in the morning when they were sleeping off their hangovers. She also portrays the inability of the UN peacekeepers to protect the civilian population because of their limited, and ineffective, mandate – they could fire only when they were fired upon, and technically protect only the humanitarian aid workers, not the civilians themselves (though there were some heroic souls who broke that mandate because they were so disgusted by their powerlessness).

There are minor details that are hugely important – street scenes, furniture, the way Bosnian women dress and talk. “The white shirt that the leading character wears throughout,” she notes at one point, “it stayed white through the rape-camp scenes – and it bothered me. We kept talking about that white shirt.”

In another poignant scene, the young Bosnian soldiers eat together in a bunker while the mortars fall around them, joking about what they will eat when the war ends. Only someone who was in Sarajevo at that time would understand their macabre banter (Sarajevans were famous in the former Yugoslavia for their clownlike humour).

The film was not made without controversy. I was in Sarajevo in July 2010, for the 15th anniversary of the massacre of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica, when the news broke that Jolie and her partner, Brad Pitt, were in Foca in eastern Bosnia. That was the scene of the “rape camps” in which Bosnian Muslim women were rounded up, then bused to halls and schools and repeatedly violated by Serb soldiers. Some of the victims told me they had been raped up to 10 times a day; one young woman was 12 when she was sent to Foca and raped alongside her mother.

But the rape issue is sensitive in Bosnia, as is anything to do with the war. At first people assumed Jolie was there in her role as a goodwill ambassador for the UNHCR. Soon word got out that she was planning to make a film. The press inaccurately reported that her script was about a woman who falls in love with her rapist. In fact, Blood And Honey is more complicated: telling the story of a couple who met before the war and a woman who is sent to the camps.

Jolie struggled to convey how prewar Sarajevo was a multicultural city and how later, neighbours who had gone to school together turned on their friends with vengeance and hatred. And yet throughout the filming (done in 42 days in Budapest and Bosnia, in two languages, once the government lifted a filming ban), even as Jolie was getting negative press from both Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs, Bravo insists she made them all feel “safe and relaxed. She created a family atmosphere.”

It took Jolie about a month to write the script, she tells me, “then it went through a lot of revisions, Brad read it, people read it.” But the logistics of directing her first film must still have been daunting.

She approached the $13m project like a student. “I read a lot of books about the war. I talked to a lot of people, I watched, I listened. I just wanted to tell the real story.” She repeats several times: “I wanted to be respectful of people.”

With six children, she still manages to travel lightly, without much security, taking the same bumpy roads and dodgy planes and going through the same military checkpoints as I do when I report from conflict zones.

During dinner, she talks about her family, how she is educating them in their own languages and cultures, how she loves to fly around the world but how hard it is to be separated from them when she is away. She talks about how someone “who never was a babysitter” knew how to take care of Maddox as a 27-year-old single mother. “I didn’t know whether to give one bottle or 30 bottles,” she says, laughing, of her son’s infant days. “I called my mother.”

Her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, a former actor and producer, who died in 2007 at 58, was a major influence. Jolie adored her. When Bertrand was dying, Jolie says, her mother told her she had done exactly what she wanted to do with her life, by simply taking care of her children. “Her goodness had a huge impact on me,” she says.

In the end, Jolie’s film stays with you. Some scenes are as vivid and horrific as the real days of war. In one, Vanesa Glodjo leaves her infant at home while she goes to raid a bombed-out pharmacy because none of the neighbours has medicine. She comes home to find him dead from a sniper’s bullet. Her screams of agony do not feel like acting. Glodjo lived through the war. More than 100,000 people died, including thousands of children. All of us who were there remember the children who were killed simply for playing. Or the “Romeo and Juliet” Muslim and Serb couple who, just after being married, were shot holding hands crossing a bridge on their way to tell their relatives the happy news. Their bodies lay on that bridge for days – snipers kept shooting at anyone who tried to move them away.

Jolie’s couple meet before the war, in a time when Sarajevo was a former Olympic city of art and music and poetry. Through their eyes, we see the disintegration of that cafe society – and, more important, what humans do to other humans to survive.

• This article first appeared in Newsweek.

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This article titled “SAG and Critics’ Circle: The Help and The Artist make a strong start in awards season” was written by Ben Child, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 14th December 2011 14.46 UTC

The Help and The Artist are the current Oscar frontrunners after sweeping the board at the Screen Actors Guild and the Critics’ Choice award nominations. Tate Taylor’s civil rights-era drama and Michel Hazanavicius’s homage to silent film received four and three nominations apiece at the Screen Actors Guild ceremony in Los Angeles, while Clint Eastwood’s Hoover biopic J Edgar, Paul Feig’s wedding comedy Bridesmaids, Alexander Payne’s The Descendents and Simon Curtis’s My Week With Marilyn trailed with two.

The Help’s haul was lead by Viola Davies, who was nominated alongside Glenn Close for Albert Nobbs, Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady, Tilda Swinton for We Need to Talk About Kevin and Michelle Williams for My Week With Marilyn in the Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor category. The film received further nominations in the Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role category, where Jessica Chastain and Octavia Spencer got a nod, alongside Bridesmaid’s Melissa McCarthy, The Artist’s Bérénice Bejo and Janet McTeer for Albert Nobbs.

The Artist’s Jean Dujardin was nominated alongside Leonardo DiCaprio (J Edgar), George Clooney (The Descendents) and Brad Pitt (Moneyball) in the Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role category. Demián Bichir proved a surprise inclusion, he was nominated for his role in Chris Weitz’s LA-set father-son morality tale A Better Life.

The Artist also picked up nominations at the Critics’ Choice awards nominations, alongside Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. The awards, run by the largest film critics organisation in the US and Canada, the Broadcast Film Critics Association, also handed eight nominations apiece to offbeat action movie Drive and civil rights-era drama The Help yesterday. George Clooney-starring family drama The Descendants and Steven Spielberg’s first world war tear-jerker War Horse received seven nominations each. All of the above were also named in the best picture category, which like the equivalent Oscars section, features 10 nominees. Joining them were Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, Bennett Miller’s Moneyball and Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

Daldry’s adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel about a nine-year-old boy who loses his father in the September 11 terrorist attacks also gave him a best director nomination. He was joined by Michel Hazanavicius for The Artist – a black-and-white silent romance heavily-tipped for Oscar wins – as well as Alexander Payne for The Descendants, Nicolas Winding Refn for Drive, Martin Scorsese for Hugo and Spielberg for War Horse. The latter is also adapted from an original novel: in this case Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 book about a Devon stable hand who searches the trenches of No Man’s Land for his beloved colt, Joey.

War Horse might have surpassed The Artist and Hugo had it not failed to pick up any nominations in the acting categories. Instead, Clooney was picked in the best actor category alongside Moneyball’s Brad Pitt, J Edgar’s Leonardo DiCaprio, The Artist’s Jean Dujardin, Shame’s Michael Fassbender and Drive’s Ryan Gosling. Best actress will go to one of Viola Davis for The Help, Elizabeth Olsen for Martha Marcy May Marlene, Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady, Tilda Swinton for We Need to Talk About Kevin, Charlize Theron for Young Adult and Michelle Williams for My Week with Marilyn. Of those, Streep, Swinton and Williams are the current Oscars frontrunners.

In the supporting categories, favourite Albert Brooks (Drive) will fight it out with Kenneth Branagh (My Week with Marilyn), Nick Nolte (Warrior), Patton Oswalt (Young Adult), Christopher Plummer (Beginners) and Andy Serkis (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) for best supporting male. The choice of the latter suggests that Serkis may just be on course to achieve his stated aim of becoming the first person to be recognised by the Academy for an entirely motion-captured performance. He plays Caesar, an intelligent ape, in the science fiction reboot. Bérénice Bejo (The Artist) is up against Jessica Chastain (The Help), Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids), Carey Mulligan (Shame), Octavia Spencer (The Help) and Shailene Woodley (The Descendants) for best supporting actress.

Following the weekend’s announcement of end-of-year lists by critics’ bodies in New York, LA, San Francisco and Boston, there was some positive news for Angelina Jolie, whose controversial directing debut In the Land of Blood and Honey has so far been roundly ignored by awards groups. The Producers Guild of America said it would be honouring the Oscar-winning star of Girl, Interrupted and Salt with its Stanley Kramer award, which is handed to film-makers who successfully shine a light on important social issues. Jolie’s drama, which exists in both English and Serbo-Croat versions, “is an extraordinary film that portrays a complex love story set against the terrors of the Bosnian war, especially towards women,” said PGA presidents Hawk Koch and Mark Gordon in a statement.

In the Land of Blood and Honey centres on a Serbian soldier who re-encounters a Bosnian woman with whom he was once romantically involved at the concentration camp where he is a commander. It was criticised by Bosnian victims of sexual violence during the Balkan conflict of the 1990s following erroneous reports in local media that the film featured scenes in which a Bosnian rape victim falls in love with her Serbian attacker. Permits for Jolie to film in the country were withdrawn and later re-instated. Jolie has described the experience as upsetting for someone who was attempting to highlight the suffering of Bosnian women in a positive way, so the PGA award may provide some solace.

Finally, the African American Film Critics Association named Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life its best film and handed acting awards to Woody Harrelson (Rampart), Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer (The Help) and Albert Brooks (Drive). The Golden Globe nominations are announced tomorrow.

• Click here for the full Critics’ Choice list

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