It’s true. It’s why everyone is predicting Jennifer Lopez’s imminent divorce from Marc Anthony because she turned up to the Golden Globes on Sunday wearing three scraps of gold lame that left her back naked. Obviously the divorce can’t be confirmed until we’ve seen at least one buttock and partial sideboob, but it’s enough for now.

Plus, you know, Jennifer Lopez wasn’t wearing a wedding ring at the Golden Globes either. That probably helps too, in retrospect.

Jennifer Lopez, it’s fair to say, is rubbish at keeping secrets. She tried to keep her pregnancy secret, remember, even though she spent months waddling around like a badly inflamed Weeble. And all that stuff about her still being Jenny from the block? If that’s not a cackhanded cover-up to disguise the fact that she’s a rampantly egotistical millionaire control freak then we’ll be a monkey’s uncle.

The latest of Jennifer Lopez’s woefully-kept secrets, however, is the perilous state of her marriage to rat-faced Latin star Marc Anthony. If reports are true, then Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony will announce their divorce on Valentine’s day, presumably because they’re both actually insane.

But that’s just a rumour. It’s not as if Jennifer Lopez has done anything to fuel the fire, is it? She hasn’t, say, turned up at an internationally-broadcast awards ceremony without her wedding ring while dressed in a frock so barely-there it may as well be a sandwich board reading ‘Are you the next Ben Affleck? Apply within’, has she?

Oh wait, now we come to think of it, that’s the exact thing that Jennifer Lopez did during Sunday’s Golden Globes. Silly us. Still, at least her dress didn’t have gold-on-gold tiger-style accents. That really would be the kiss of death to her marriage. The New York Daily News reports:

Since her 2004 marriage to Marc Anthony, Jennifer Lopez has gone conservative (by her standards), ditching her notoriously flashy clothes for duds with more coverage. But at the Golden Globes, good ol’ Jenny from the block was back with a vengeance. Lopez sauntered down the red carpet in an extremely low-cut, backless Marchesa gown blinged out with gold-on-gold tiger-style accents.

NOOOOOOOO! It’s over! It’s all over! Jennifer Lopez is definitely getting divorced from Marc Anthony! There’s no way around it!

But, come on, let’s all pull ourselves together. Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony are getting divorced, but what does that mean? Well it means we’ll have to say goodbye to the Jennifer Lopez/ Marc Anthony joint tours and the hopeless Jennifer Lopez/ Marc Anthony movie biopics of people who nobody cares about. Somehow we think we’ll cope.

But it’s not all bad news. After she divorces Marc Anthony, the old Jennifer Lopez is bound to resurface. You know, the one who dresses like a chav at a wedding, makes endless identical romantic comedies that all seem to co-star Matthew McConaughey and releases album after album of reedy, watered-down R&B music that she assumes the kids will like even though she’s old enough to be the kids’ mother now.

OK, it is all bad news. Sorry for misleading you.

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But last night’s Golden Globes had an unavoidably sad shadow looming over them. Was this because it was the first major awards show to honour the late Heath Ledger’s role in The Dark Knight by giving him the award for Best Supporting Actor? In part, yes.

But mainly it’s because Mickey Rourke decided to use his Golden Globes acceptance speech to eulogise some of his dead pets. And because Rumer Willis‘ face gives us the creeps.

There was a time when the Golden Globes only really existed as an excuse for Jack Nicholson to turn up, listen to four jokes about himself, laugh loudly and then presumably get drunk enough to knock stuff over afterwards. But over the last couple of years, the Golden Globes have become a much gloomier affair.

Last year this was because the Golden Globes coincided with the writers’ strike, which meant that – if memory serves correct – it was conducted within the space of ten minutes from a pasting table set-up in the car park of the Bognor Regis branch of Matalan.

This year, though, the Golden Globes were gloomy because of the unavoidable fact that one of the year’s most effervescent screen performances was given by a dead man. That’s right, we’re talking about Kate Winslet and her role in Revolutionary Road.

Oh, and Heath Ledger too. Although his posthumous Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor for his role as The Joker in The Dark Knight had always been a given thanks to both his remarkable performance and his untimely death, whether or not he’d actually win any of the awards was a different matter.

But, as the New York Daily News reports, last night he did – and his director Christopher Nolan was there to collect the award:

The announcement of Ledger’s name by presenter Demi Moore was met with a standing ovation by the crowd, followed by “Dark Knight” director Christopher Nolan’s short but moving speech. “I accept this with an awful mixture of sadness and intense pride,” said Nolan, adding that Ledgers’ death a year ago at age 28 meant “a hole had been ripped in the future of cinema.”

Elsewhere, Golden Globes were won by Mickey Rourke – who did his weird dog-dedicating thing – along with the miniseries John Adams, 30 Rock, Slumdog Millionaire and the well-deserved double Golden Globes win by Kate Winslet for her turns in The Reader and Revolutionary Road. We say well-deserved, but obviously we’re talking about us, because hopefully this means we won’t have to listen to her bleating on about how she never wins anything any more. And that’d be a relief, frankly.

However, last night’s Golden Globes belonged to one person, and that’s Heath Ledger. It’s just a shame he wasn’t around to see it.

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But even though most of the world would rather crap out it’s spinal column than watch the Golden Globes, at least there’s one person who’s looking forward to it - Anne Hathaway. Anne’s up for an award and she’s JACKED about it!

And we know that this is our third Anne Hathaway story in two days. It’s just a quiet news day. That’s all. We’re not stalking her. There are papers saying we can’t to do that any more.

There’s more to Anne Hathaway than creepy criminal ex-boyfriends, a party-dampening mistrust of beloved public figures and a gaping loneliness so vast that she has to crawl to middle-aged lesbians for romantic guidance, you know. She’s also, apparently, an actress.

And not just an actress who only stars in gormless-looking red-font comedies about hilarious weddings, either – Anne Hathaway is a serious actress who occasionally stars in very serious films about grumpy people who mumble a lot. After all, that’s the way to win awards, we heard.

Which is why Anne Hathaway is up for a best actress Golden Globe for her role in Rachel Getting Married, which is an important film because a) it’s got a bad-tempered woman who hardly wears any make-up on it and b) we couldn’t even watch a two-minute preview of it without getting bored, losing track of what was going on and wondering what we’d have for tea.

But at least it’s earnt Anne Hathaway a Golden Globe nomination, which is either a tantalising portent of an Oscar victory or an impractically-shaped wedge of metal handed to you by some journalists with funny accents, depending on how you look at these things. Anyway, Anne’s totally PSYCHED about it, as she told the LA Times:

“I haven’t attended that many award shows in my life. The Golden Globes: I’ve [only] been [there as] part of film that’s been nominated – that’s actually the only time I’ve gone. It’s very exciting to be singled out for an individual performance. That hasn’t happened to me very much in my career.”

Well, we’re just thrilled for Anne Hathaway. But not as thrilled as we suspect the Golden Globes organisers are – this is the first recorded instance of someone expressing an interest in the show for over three decades. Honestly, if you took everyone on the planet who cared about the Golden Globes and bundled them into the boot of a car, it’s estimated that nobody at all would notice. Not even those people’s parents.

Anyway, just for her exuberance alone we hope that Anne Hathaway wins her Golden Globe, and then goes on to win an Oscar as well. And we’re saying that only because we want to see what she’s like in a relentless succession of bone-dry films about complex real-life international issues that nobody would ever dream of paying to watch. That’s how it works, isn’t it?

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Yeah, it’s not. We got that wrong. Sorry. Although WALL-E won Best Picture at a recent awards ceremony, the nominations for next year’s Golden Globes were announced yesterday, and they seem to indicate that it’ll be another good year for dreary films about troubled people who stare into the middle distance a lot.

Golden Globes front-runners include Doubt, Frost/Nixon and Revolutionary Road. So far so miserable. But Batman got a look-in too, with one nomination for, oh, the dead chap. Joy.

Hey, you there! Do you often find yourself getting annoyed because the Oscars don’t go on for as long as you want, what with the nominations, the luncheons, the six-hour red carpet specials and the actual ceremony itself, full of smug introductions and damp-eyed acceptance speeches and the obligatory 400-song performance by shitting Enya?

No, neither do we. Neither does anyone. But, anyway here are the Golden Globes nominations, which are significant because there’s a minuscule chance that they might influence the Oscars in some barely-noticeable way! Hooray!

And the Golden Globes are going to damn well make sure they don’t screw anything up this time – not like their last strike-crippled ceremony, which involved a man sitting at a table reading out names for half an hour. So forget the fact that WALL-E was recently named as the best film of the year by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association – this year the Golden Globes are getting SERIOUS! Only the dreariest, most quietly depressing movies are being made this year. No fun allowed, you hear?

That’s why, as yesterday’s Golden Globes nominations revealed, The Dark Knight and WALL-E were effectively pushed out of contention in favour of lots of films that only drama teachers will pretend to like. The New York Times reports:

A gloomy Hollywood on Thursday put aside a dismal economy and the threat of an actors’ strike, focusing instead on Golden Globe nominations that thrust “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Frost/Nixon” to the award season’s center stage with five each, with both nominated for best dramatic picture. “Doubt” also received five nominations.

Although WALL-E was nominated for Best Animated Feature and The Dark Knight picked up a nod for Best Supporting Actor for Heath Ledger – a category that also bizarrely recognises Tom Cruise’s weird little turn in Tropic Thunder – that’s about it. The big films to be named in the Golden Globes nominations were:

Revolutionary Road (Kate Winslet sobs because she’s trapped in a suburban hell)

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt sobs because he ages backwards and is a bit like Forrest Gump)

The Reader (Kate Winslet sobs because of the Holocaust and whatever)

Doubt (Philip Seymour Hoffman sobs because Meryl Streep caught him bumming a boy or something, and probably sobs about it too, we expect)

Frost/Nixon (Nobody sobs, but there are lots of heavy pauses and meaningful looks, which are almost as good)

Slumdog Millionaire (An uplifting film about… hey, did we just say ‘uplifting’? How did this get on the list? Someone’s head will roll for this, you hear? ROLL!)

The Golden Globes will be held on January 11. Please let this information affect you however you choose.

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It was the oddest Golden Globes you're ever likely to see – no stars attended, no fancy frocks were worn, results were blasted through in a matter of minutes and the traditional Golden Globes pursuit of trying to second-guess which rabbit-eyed young starlet would be fighting off the advances of Jack Nicholson by the end of the night was put on hold.

And if that wasn't harrowing enough, Atonement won a Golden Globe as well. We're all doomed.

The writer's strike has done several things to the world of film and TV, some bad – like taking The Daily Show off the air – and some less bad (coughDa Vinci Code sequelcough). And somewhere in the middle is last night's Golden Globes awards ceremony.

Up until the last minute nobody knew what would happen to the Golden Globes after the WGA and the SAG banned their members from attending so long as it was being televised, but there were three choices: 1) ditch the Golden Globes altogether, 2) don't televise the Golden Globes so that celebrities can still attend and 3) cobble together a hasty, amateurish half-hour press conference to announce the winners of the Golden Globes that leaves everyone – hosts, broadcasters, winners and viewers – feeling slightly cheapened.

Needless to say, they went with number three.

Everything that people enjoy most about the Golden Globes – the sparkle, the dresses, the freewheeling spirit of semi-drunk playfulness, was absent from the press conference; replaced with a sense of profound embarrassment that the winners were all at home watching the events unravel on Telemundo instead of being up on stage making four-hour teary-eyed acceptance speeches about the power of cinema. 

But perhaps it was best that the Golden Globes weren't televised, because the majority of the winners were all so vastly obscure that nobody would have watched more than 10 minutes of it anyway. Best actress? Julie Christie in That Film Nobody Has Seen. Best actress in a comedy or musical? Some woman nobody's heard of in That Film Nobody Has Seen. Best actor in a TV comedy? David Duchovny in That TV Show That People Saw Once Before Quickly Deciding It Was Rubbish And Turning Off To Do Something More Interesting Like Removing Someone Else's Toe Jam With Their Tongue.

And, worst of all, Atonement won the Golden Globe for best motion picture even though if we wanted to watch a bunch of upper-class bibbles mimbling on endlessly about their problems in rage-inducing accents we'd probably just prefer to watch an episode of Trinny And Susannah.

Still, not all the Golden Globe winners were this dull. Johnny Depp won best actor (comedy) for Sweeney Todd – which also scooped the best comedy or musical movie award – Daniel Day-Lewis won best actor for There Will Be Blood, Tina Fey won best comedy actress for 30 Rock and No Country For Old Men also took a couple of prizes.

But that's not what the 2008 Golden Globes will be remembered for – not when the awards were handed out in such a perfunctory star-free manner.

Now we'll just have to see what happens to the Oscars next month. Hopefully, if the strike is still ongoing until then, lessons will be learnt and the same toe-curling mistakes won't be repeated again.

Because, really, Atonement?

Read more:

Atonement leads glitz-free Globes – Associated Press  

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.

Read more:

With stars dimming NBC may unplug Globes – Reuters 

Although the Writers Guild Of America strike currently just means that Ellen DeGeneres' infantile dog-based on-air tantrums are ad-libbed instead of tightly-scripted, the Guild has now decided to reject offers of an interim agreement allowing writers to work on next year's Golden Globes and Oscar ceremonies. That means that either this awards season will culminate in two long, awkward, unfunny, massively unentertaining shows or that the Golden Globes and the Oscars hire non-union writers from Lithuania to shape the ceremonies – fingers crossed for the latter, because LNK TV show Žinios. Verslas. Kriminalai has gone without a slick satirical Hollywood skewering for too long now.

The Golden Globes and the Oscars provide a chance to do several things at once. Not only are awards handed out to mark high achievement in the world of filmmaking, but the gatherings also mean that all the famous actors in the world can get together and say how brilliant they are for making serious films that nobody would ever dream of watching. But much more than that, they are a chance to sing smug, sharply-scripted songs about how old Jack Nicholson is looking these days. 

But not this year. Although the fact that Atonement has more Golden Globe nominations than anyone else would usually be cause for writers to rush off to their notepads and start scribbling down jokes about what a skinny posh wanker Keira Knightley is, this year there's none of that because the ongoing Writers Guild Of America strike is going to render both the Golden Globes and the Oscars jokeless.

Not that the awards shows aren't trying, though – to save face, the Oscars and the Golden Globes had been trying to fix some sort of interim agreement with writers to make sure that either ceremony didn't fall on its arse, but the Writers Guild has swatted the proposals away. Not only that, but the WGA has also banned the Oscars from using clips of movies or past ceremonies. And the organisers of the Golden Globes are understandably a little bit peeved:

"The Golden Globe Awards, which has a long and friendly relationship with the Writers Guild of America, is obviously disappointed that the WGA denied its request for a waiver, [but] encouraged by the fact that the WGA has announced that it plans to negotiate agreements with independent production companies."

So there's hope yet that the Golden Globes will be a mess of flubbed pre-prepared jokes instead of a mess of flubbed spontaneous jokes. And as for the Oscars – well, it's Jon Stewart that we feel sorry for. He's been given a second chance at hosting the Oscars after his first shot drew mixed reviews for being too clever, and now it looks like he'll be spending three hours scuffing his feet in a near-empty auditorium telling half-remembered jokes and not showing any clips of any of the nominated movies whatsoever.

Still, it's thought that this will still be better than Billy Crystal ever was.

Read more:

Hollywood Writers Reject Award Shows – Associated Press 

OK, we'll admit, the thought of awards season fills us with the kind of gut-knotting horror usually only reserved for directly after hearing the line "and now, ladies and gentlemen, Lee Ryan!" But trying to stop Hollywood's movie industry hyping its awards season blind months in advance of any actual awards being handed out is an impossible task, which is why we're just going to roll over and say that at next year's Golden Globes, the Cecil B. DeMille outstanding contribution award will go to Steven Spielberg, a new up-and-coming arthouse director yet to have his first big hit.

The Golden Globes will take place on January 13th next year. That's a full two months away, but time to get excited about them anyway, because the Golden Globes are like a funner kind of Oscars, with more jokes, more categories dedicated to  comedies and television and more pre-show official countdown compilation shows presented by Sharon Stone fake-laughing at clips of Jack Nicholson in such a transparently false way that it looks like she's in the throes of a near-fatal asthma attack.

Nobody knows who'll win any of next year's Golden Globes yet – the nominations aren't even going to be revealed for another month – except one. That's the Cecil B. DeMille award for outstanding contribution to entertainment. Each year since 1952, starting with the director that bore its name, the Golden Globes has presented the Cecil B. DeMille Award to an individual with an extraordinarily high level of consistency in terms of their professional output. For example, Warren Beatty won the Cecil B. DeMille award last year, and was preceded by Sir Anthony Hopkins in 2006.

The year before that it was Robin Williams, but we don't like to talk about that. 

And next year's recipient is already out of the bag – it's Steven Spielberg. Now, you can't fault the timing of the Golden Globes in wanting to give the award to Steven Spielberg next year, because it's the year that Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull – directed by Steven Spielberg – will be released, a film which originally had the title of I'm Steven Spielberg, Could You All Just Save Me A Bit Of Time And Give Me All Your Money Now Please. Needless to say, handing Steven Spielberg what amounts to a lifetime achievement award months before he releases what could be his biggest-ever hit is a clever move on the part of the Golden Globes.

Plus, if they gave it to Steven Spielberg any later, it might be after his confusingly abstract film about gravitation physics, quasars and active galactic nuclei, at which point Steven Spielberg will only qualify for Most Improbably Dull Movie About Notions That The General Public Could Never Even Possibly Begin To Fathom awards.

But still, congratulations to Steven Spielberg, who now has two months to dream up an acceptance speech ahead of the Golden Globes. Tenner says it'll begin with "Barbra Streisand won this award seven years before I did. Seven years! Me! Steven Spielberg! My mistake, she must have done a better job of directing ET than I did. And Robin Williams! Robin Williams! I made Jaws, you ungrateful bunch of wankers!" at which point he'll be escorted from the stage.