This very much looks like George Clooney’s spring.

The American actor-director seems all set to clinch the Golden Globe on January 15 for his role in The Descendants, directed by Alexander Payne.

As a man, who looks every bit his age (he hit 50 last May) in the movie, Clooney plays a bitter-sweet role in The Descendants who goes searching with his two daughters for his comatose wife’s lover. No easy task. As a Honolulu-based lawyer, Matt King, Clooney gets into the skin of a character the like of whom he has never played before.  King wears unstylish clothes, has untidy hair and appears helpless and vulnerable – afraid of the loss he has to face.

Clooney’s King is quite different from Clooney’s Mike Morris in his own helmed The Ideas of March, also recently released. As the suave, confident , debonair and dashing  Pennsylvania Governor and Democratic Presidential candidate -- whose brief sexual dalliance with an intern ( a la Bill Clinton) imperils his chances at the White House  -- Clooney is of course brilliant.

But this is the usual Clooney whom I have seen over the years – as  Fred Friendly, a broadcast producer in the early days of television journalism (1953) in Good Night, and Good Luck (directed by himself), as Bob Barnes, a veteran CIA operations guy in Syriana, in Michael Clayton, in Burn After Reading and in Up in the Air. Impeccable and killingly handsome, to boot, with his salt-and-pepper hair adding to his appeal.

Strangely, I have always been reminded of Carry Grant whenever I saw Clooney. Both men had this kind of self-assuredness that was pleasing and comforting, not intimidating or discomforting.

And now, to take the words from an article I saw on the web, “George Clooney is headed to war – and not just the (coming) Oscar race”. At the recent Palm Springs International Film Festival, he said his next movie will have World War II as the backdrop.

Called The Monuments Men, it will tell the story of historians who went to Normandy to try and save the art that Hitler looted. To be helmed and acted in by Clooney, the film will be based on a 2009 book by Robert Edsel. Sony Pictures will produce it. Clooney quipped that it will be a great love story.

A love tale between a group of art experts and the treasures they so desperately wanted to preserve. The group had no combat experience, and yet it had to face fire with two of them even dying in the battle of Normandy.

Hitler was a fanatic, but no so well known was his fanaticism for art, and he stashed away masterpieces wherever he could. He hid 27 Rembrandts in a coffin! And who finds them, a woman called Rose of French Resistance.

That is The Monuments Men, but before the guys plays out their parts on the screen, Clooney may have well read his acceptance speech at the Golden Globes, and who knows, even at the Oscars.