Thanks to the ongoing writers' strike, shows like 24 have been indefinitely postponed much to everyone's disappointment – but on the other hand the Golden Globes might be cancelled too, so it all evens out.
The Golden Globes – the all-singing, all-dancing, glitzy, foreign-voted cousin to the Oscars – is set to take place on Sunday, but the writers' strike means that it will be boycotted by all the nominees if it gets televised by NBC as planned. And now the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is pushing NBC to not broadcast the awards at all so that the stars won't face picket lines on their way in. Of course, without cameras there to capture them in their pretty dresses and painstaking make-up jobs, there's a good chance that the cast of Desperate Housewives will disintegrate into clouds of dust at some point during the ceremony, but that's the chance they'll have to take.
We take everything back about awards season. Everything at all. We know we've been laying into it for a couple of months now, saying that the whole thing is nothing more that a series of excuses for actors to publicly congratulate each other for being so brilliant at repeating a handful of words off a piece of paper at a time in funny costumes, but in reality this might just be the best awards season ever.
And that's all down to the striking writers. Sure, the Writers Guild Of America strike has meant that your favourite TV shows – and Heroes – aren't getting made properly, that the sequel to The Da Vinci Code has been postponed and that Jay Leno has been told off for telling a bunch of lame jokes off the top of his head, but it also means that the Golden Globes might not be on TV this year.
You know the Golden Globes – the award ceremony that's like the Oscars except Sharon Stone gets to do a nauseating retrospective highlight show filled with preposterously unconvincing fake laughter beforehand. This year it looks like Atonement might win a lot of Golden Globes, only you probably won't see it because the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, organisers of the Golden Globes, wants NBC to drop the broadcast of the ceremony to stop it turning into a no-star farce.
You see, if the Golden Globes are televised, then nobody from the Screen Actors Guild will show up. And that means that there'll be nobody to present the awards and nobody to receive them. According to SAG president Alan Rosenberg:
"After considerable outreach to Golden Globe actor nominees and their
representatives over the past several weeks, there appears to be
unanimous agreement that these actors will not cross WGA picket lines
to appear on the Golden Globe Awards as acceptors or presenters."
So today NBC will make the decision whether to go ahead with the Golden Globes broadcast even though it'll consist of an empty plinth in front of rows and rows of empty chairs, whether to delay it for a few weeks while it negotiates with the WGA or whether to drop it from the schedules completely and let the ceremony take place away from television.
Fingers crossed that it won't be the last option, because we don't know if we'd be able to cope knowing that somebody was handing out awards to actors behind our backs. To think, it's a possibility that this time next week the only way we'll know the Golden Globes even happened is by the four billion newspaper pictures of Cameron Diaz twatting about on the red carpet in a dress that she's clearly 15 years too old for. And what a kick in the nuts that'd be.
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