By which we, of course, mean acting. Just a few short months after the Hollywood writers strike came bumbling to an end, the two big actor unions are squabbling over whether or not they should go on strike too. And in times as troubled as these a wise, near-biblical hero figure is needed to set everything back on course.

And, with thudding inevitability, that figure is George Clooney. George Clooney has written a letter to both the Screen Actors Guild (which wants to strike) and the American Federation of TV and Radio Artists (which doesn't) proclaiming his clear and ineffably correct opinion on who's right and who's wrong. Turns out he thinks that everyone's right. Nice going George, that could have got nasty.

Oh, for god's sake. All we want to do is watch a new season of 24 – is that too much to ask? Is that too difficult for you Hollywood bigshots to understand? We wanted to see Jack Bauer torturing as many brown people as possible within the space of a day because of an arbitrarily preposterous, rightwing, wildly xenophobic terrorist scare this January, but the writer's strike arsed that up. 

And now it looks as if the actors are going to go on strike as well, potentially scuppering another season. Damn you, actors! At this rate the next time we'll get to watch a new season of 24, three quarters of it will be about Jack Bauer having a lovely nap in front of the television with a blanket over his elderly legs. Damn you!

But, anyway, the actors might be going on strike because… oh, who cares why the actors might be going on strike? They're just actors, after all. But the potential of an actor strike has divided the acting community into those who definitely want to strike and those who probably want to strike. The whole industry's on the brink of a civil war! The Baldwins could be torn asunder! Will nobody think of the Baldwins?

However, one man has made it his duty to unite both SAG and AFTRA. He's a lion of man, a man who can't be hurt by freaky-looking male models or hard slabs of asphalt, a man who can get Danny DeVito hammered and live to tell the tale. That man, as if you needed to be told, is George Clooney.

George Clooney is Hollywood's golden boy. He can make any kind of movie you like – searing political thrillers, smug heist movies, horribly unpopular sports comedies – and so he's absolutely best placed to look down on the squabbling actor's unions and cast forth his opinion. Which he has, in the form of a letter.

So who does George Clooney think is right? The union that wants to strike hard now or the union that wants to negotiate because people are already pissed off that this last season of Lost was slightly shorter than usual? E! Online has the details:

"Both are, of course, right. AFTRA feels that a work stoppage would be devastating to its members and SAG believes that if they don't draw a line in the sand, the studios will repeat what they did with DVDs… I've been very lucky in my career, which has put me in the place that I don't need a union to check on my residuals, or my pension, or protect my 12-hour turnaround."

So George Clooney isn't going to take sides. That's fine, we guess – he's still got involved, and that's what's important. Let's just hope that George Clooney's letter makes a difference, because it's not as if the world is full of wannabe actors who'll take badly-paid non-union jobs just because they'll end up famous, is it?

In other news, some actors think that Daniel Day-Lewis is quite good at acting.

The SAG awards took place last night, and because it's just about the only awards show where nobody will get booed by the people who write Smallville just for attending, almost every single actor in the world turned up. And by now you'll already be able to guess who won.

The writers' strike has made a right old arsepickle out of awards season this year, and for that we'll be eternally grateful. Because the Screen Actors Guild – the SAG, if you will – officially supports the WGA (Writers Guild Of America. Do keep up), it has banned its members from turning up to anything that the WGA wrinkles its nose at. So the Golden Globes turned into the world's dullest press conference, the People's Choice Awards turned into a retrospective clips show about Drew Barrymore and the Oscars are already flatlining.

But, thanks to a contractual loophole, one awards show that SAG did allow actors to attend was last night's SAG awards. And, knowing that this might be their only chance to be pictured in a newspaper looking massively overdressed and buffed to within an inch of their lives on a red carpet, just about every actor alive decided to turn up.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were there, Tom Cruise was there, Daniel Day-Lewis was there, Cate Blanchett was there, Eva Longoria was there, that annoying scrawny woman from Grey's Anatomy was there, her off Will & Grace was there, Burt Reynolds was there – and by our calculations we're pretty sure that those are all the actors alive at the moment.

But what about the SAG awards themselves? Surely, with the world treating the show as a kind of substitute Oscars, SAG could really pull the rug out from everyone's feet and award trophies to some refreshingly left-field choices. Or perhaps it'd just lob awards at the actors everyone expected instead. Guess.

The winner of the SAG award for Best Male Actor In A Leading Role went to Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood – adding to his Golden Globe, his LA Film Critics award, his New York Film Critics award and his third runner-up prize in the Speen Parish Council summer fete's Guess The Weight Of The Cake contest. No Country For Old Men also won two SAG Awards – Best Ensemble and Best Supporting Actor – adding to its already impressive award tally. And Julie Christie also won for her role in that film about the old lady, just like she has everywhere else.

And, since the SAG awards also honour television performances, we should add that The Sopranos won stuff, 30 Rock won stuff and The Office won stuff. But nobody really cares about any of that because it's just TV.

And that's all. So long as the writers' strike continues it's just this and the Grammys. And, you know, if the WGA wants to come over here and picket the Brits as a favour to us next month, we'd appreciate it.

Read more:

Stars Seize Their Chance to Shine at SAG Awards – New York Times 

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