Golden Globes: Doubling Down

Obviously, the fun and wacky narrative informing this year's Golden Globe nominees is the multiple nominees: Leonardo DiCaprio will compete against himself, earning two nominations in the Best Actor/Film Drama category, for "The Departed" and "Blood Diamond," and Clint Eastwood took two of the slots in the Best Director race for his World War II films "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima."

But a whole slew of other actors scored double nominations, and then there's Helen Mirren, who scored three nominations, for Best Actress/Film Drama ("The Queen") and two in Best Actress/TV-Movie or Miniseries ("Elizabeth I," "Prime Suspect: The Final Act").

Toni Collette was nominated for Best Actress/Film Comedy ("Little Miss Sunshine") and Supporting Actress/TV ("Tsunami, the Aftermath"). Chiwetel Ejiofor received nods in Best Actor/Film Comedy ("Kinky Boots") and Supporting Actor/TV ("Tsunami, the Aftermath"). Emily Blunt was queen of the Supporting Actress categories, film ("The Devil Wears Prada") and TV ("Gideon's Daughter").

There were, according to one report, 709 movies released this year vying for those five directing slots, meaning that directors had 7/10ths of 1% chance of receiving a nomination. To receive two, as Clint Eastwood did, beats the odds of 4.97333299 times 10 to the negative fifth degree.

There are roughly 98,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild, and 70 possible nominees. Which means an actor, from the outset, has only a .07% chance of securing a nomination. That's 7/100ths of a 1% chance.

But the chances of scoring two nominations are 5.10204081 times 10 to the negative seventh degree (or 0.0000000510204081).

And the chances of managing the feat in the same category, like DiCaprio did, are 2.60308205 times 10 to the negative 11th degree. And then, if you're like Mirren and scored two nominations in one category and another besides, the likelihood of that is 1.85934432 times 10 to the negative fifteenth degree.

And then, if you want to calculate the chances that this many actors would claim so many nominations amongst so few slots available, you'd need to go to CalTech to get that number and hope you don't short-circuit their supercomputer.

Naturally, someone out there is going to question my math and my methodology, but I'm The Mayor of Television, not David Krumholz on "Numb3rs."

Anyway. The point is. It's extraordinarily extremely unlikely that these actors would have such wonderful good luck against all their brethren. Unless, say, the Hollywood Foreign Press folks wanted to gin up some publicity by fabricating such a phenomenon or were lazy and simply couldn't get certain names out of their heads while voting.