INXS Miniseries, Nick Cave Up For AACTA Awards

This year's Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) Awards have a resoundingly musical bent, with not only free-to-air miniseries Never Tear Us Apart — based on the life and experiences of incendiary Aussie rock act INXS — picking up multiple nominations, but legendary musos Nick Cave and Warren Ellis scoring a nod for their contributions to the medium.

Cave and Ellis picked up their nomination for their work on ABC documentary Tender in the new, APRA AMCOS-presented Best Original Music Score In A Documentary category, in which they'll face off against career screen composers such as Jed Palmer, Zoe Barry and Ricky Edwards, Brett Aplin and Amy Bastow. The category is rounded out by a name that might ring familiar to more than a few of you — Jed Kurzel, of The Mess Hall fame, who took home a nomination for his work on All This Mayhem.

Separately, Roger Mason, of Models fame, who recently took home a prize at the Screen Music Awards, is also up for a composition prize — he's been nominated for Best Original Music Score In Television for his work on ABC's The Code. Renowned singer-songwriter Jeff Lang is up in that category too, for ABC's The Gods Of Wheat Street. David Hirschfelder, of The Little River Band and John Farnham's band, picked up dual nominations in the category of Best Original Music Score, for Healing and The Railway Man.

Never Tear Us Apart, meanwhile, was nominated for excellence across a broad array of categories, including Best Telefeature Or Miniseries, Best Direction In A Television Drama Or Comedy, Best Lead Actor In A Television Drama (Luke Arnold), and Best Guest Or Supporting Actor In A Television Drama (Andy Ryan).

Music dominated the Best Reality Television Series category, too, with MasterChef Australia the only non-talent show to be recognised alongside The Voice Australia, The Voice Kids and The X Factor.

Otherwise, the AACTA Awards recognise a broad spread of talented people from across the big and small screens, including obvious crops such as Best Film (The Babadook, Charlie's Country, Predestination, The Railway Man, Tracks, The Water Diviner), Best Feature-length Documentary (All This Mayhem, Deepsea Challenge 3D, The Last Impresario, the widely acclaimed, multiple-nominee Ukraine Is Not A Brothel), and Best Television Drama Series (The Code, Janet King, Puberty Blues, Rake), among several other categories — fourteen feature-film prizes, twenty television prizes, seven documentary prizes and two short-film prizes.

You can get across the full list of nominees at the AACTAs website. The fourth annual AACTA Awards will be held in Sydney early next year, and will be broadcast on Channel Ten on Thursday, January 29, 2015.