Rastafarian action figure, with melted face, Lil Wayne, has rocked the Earth to the molten core by revealing that he won’t be enlightening us all via social networking anymore. That’s right – he’s going on strike from Twitter! How will we cope with this news? SOMEONE SET UP A HELPLINE, STAT!

hecklerspray won’t be able to function properly now, walking around in a daze and grabbing people by their collars and wailing loudly “Adidas sweats,shiny ass Adidas! Remember when Weezy wrote that?! Do you?! Those were salad days! Remember that time he just wrote “um yeah”? Do you? We won’t be getting that now. It is just too sad to comprehend”.

We’ll then do that funny crab dance he’s fond of, complete with solemnly bowed head.

Apparently, this devastating news comes on the back of multiple hacks on his account and he’s fed up like Alexander O’Neal, which has prompted him to have a Twitter vacation.

He says:

“I just shut my Twitter account down because it got hacked. Once it got hacked, I had Twitter fix it. They changed it. And then it got hacked again, so I just shut it down. As of right now, I’m on Twitter strike.”

It is thought that Wayne might get a Bebo account where no-one will ever hack into the accounts because, inside, there’s only two people talking to each other – the founder and their mother saying ‘It’ll be alright. You’ve done very well you know?’, before drawing a crude love heart with the graffiti application.

Wayne’s account (@LilTuneChi) was hacked in January, when updates started hitting people’s timelines. People suspected it might be a rogue at work because, for the first time, Wayne had actually started being interesting.

The hacker promptly started hurling insults at Soulja Boy.

It said:

“I sent a donations to your paypal, check it, I heard you got 13,000 sales lil homie, i feel bad for you! #D*mnSoulja”

We give Lil Wayne a week before he’s back on twitter, saying things like ‘Ohio is off the chain!’ and ‘Um’.

Now, if you could be a pet and go on strike from music for the rest of your life, that would be wonderful. Okay? Okay. Good.

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Previously, the only way you’d see Tom Hanks fighting Mel Gibson was to watch the unmade movie Forrest Gump Punches Mad Max In Space.

But now Tom Hanks and Mel Gibson have emerged as figureheads on opposing sides of a dispute over whether actors should go on strike because there aren’t enough fame-blinded young nymphomaniacs who’ll indulge their every fleeting sexual whim or whatever.

Mel Gibson is for the strike, Tom Hanks is against it. Sadly Mel Gibson will win, because the dispute will be settled by charging at each other across a field. Poor Tom Hanks – if only it involved growing a crap mullet and ranting about Jesus.

Our favourite part of this year, hands down, was the writers’ strike. It was brilliant – fed up with not being paid enough royalties for material shown on the internet, film and television writers all put their tools down and deliberately crippled the industry.

Except what actually happened in the writers’ strike was this a) the Golden Globes got cancelled, b) Lost got to make a shorter-than-usual season that wasn’t full of guffy episodes about nothing and c) 24 was forced to take a year off, allowing its producers to think of a way to make it less embarrassingly rubbish. In short, only brilliant things came from the writers’ strike.

And that’s why the actors have decided to have a go too – the Screen Actors Guild has long been brewing over whether or not to go on strike for similar reasons to the actors and, despite George Clooney’s efforts, ballots will be sent out to members first thing next year.

Imagine what’ll happen if the actors do go on strike – not only will your favourite shows get screwed for another season, but actors will have to spend most of their time sitting around not doing any real work. We genuinely can’t imagine what that’d be like.

But some actors don’t want to go on strike. They’re claiming, quite sensibly, that another strike-crippled winter wouldn’t be fair on all the piecemeal crew members forced out of work and that, with a global recession looming ever closer, the last thing that the public wants to see is a load of manicured moviestars stamping their feet because they only got $18 million for pretending to be a hard-bitten policeman who doesn’t follow the rules instead of $19 million.

And that’s why these actors have taken a stand and, um, written a strongly-worded letter. The New York Times reports:

“We support our union and we support the issues we’re fighting for, but we do not believe in all good conscience that now is the time to be putting people out of work.” Beneath that was what might have been the cast list for a tentpole blockbuster: George Clooney, Glenn Close, Cameron Diaz, Charlize Theron, Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman and Tom Hanks.

That’s quite a list of names – who’d be stupid enough to argue with nice guys like George Clooney and Tom Hanks, powerful girls like Glenn Close and Charlize Theron, the actual voice of God in Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, a man who once made a comedy about some cojoined twins?

Actually, Mel Gibson would. And so would Sandra Oh. And Holly Hunter. And Jerry O’Connell. And this disagreement has driven a wedge through the middle of Hollywood, a community which usually prefers to publicly rub its own tummy until it gets a hardon.

What happens next remains to be seen, but there is one obvious solution staring everyone in the face here – let Mel Gibson and Sandra Oh and Holly Hunter and Jerry O’Connell go on strike and everyone else doesn’t have to.

That way the striking actors get to make the point they so firmly believe in, and we get to go a few months without having to watch Grey’s Anatomy, Saving Grace, any new Mel Gibson films at all or Kangaroo Jack 2: Jack Bounces Back. Everyone’s happy.

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It looks like 2008 has turned into the year of strikes – even the most comically pointless, vanity-fuelled professions are packing up their tools in a huff.

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?

While everyone can agree that the writers' strike has gone on for too long, they all also secretly agree that it'd be nice if it just went on for long enough to screw up the Oscars.

However, as signs of a deal tentatively edge ever-closer, it looks like the Oscars might be business as usual again. And all the Oscar nominees had the traditional Oscar nominees' luncheon yesterday to prove it, with Academy president Sid Ganis promising that the show would go on regardless of the strike.

But that begs the question: what will the Oscars be like with no jokes, no song-and-dance numbers and no fun? Why, they'll be just like the Oscars, you halfwit.

The writers' strike has naused up Hollywood something rotten lately. Thousands of crewmembers are out of work, Lost is only going to be on for eight episodes instead of sixteen and the Golden Globes met a grisly end. But can the writers' strike kill the Oscars? Um, well, there's a possibility of that, we admit. But can the writers' strike kill the sort of luncheon thing that the people nominated for Oscars usually go to each year? NO!

How could the annual Oscar nominees' luncheon possibly be cancelled when it's responsible for golden Hollywood moments like Keira Knightley talking about herself? That's why every single actor and actress nominated for an Oscar attended yesterday's luncheon, with the exception of Cate Blanchett. And Johnny Depp. And Tom Wilkinson. And Daniel Day-Lewis, Saoirse Ronan, Tilda Swinton and Tommy Lee Jones. And Philip Seymour Hoffman. But everyone else turned up. Well, George Clooney and the girl from Juno did, anyway. The Los Angeles Times reports:

The Oscar nominees' luncheon — a long-held tradition at the Beverly Hilton Hotel that usually kicks off the giddy weeks before the televised ceremony — couldn't quite shake the long shadow cast by the 13-week writers strike, despite news that a settlement could come as early as Friday. George Clooney, nominated for his performance in the legal thriller "Michael Clayton," strode into the press room looking tan and trim and joking that he had just returned from "two weeks in four conflict zones" and was entering yet another.

And what's more, the president of the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Scientists Sid Ganis whipped the crowd into a quasi-biblical frenzy with his never-say-die attitude to the writers' strike:

"The Oscar exists because the academy founders believed movies were not just a business and people need to be reminded of this. We did it 80 years ago in the Blossom Room at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, and we'll do it again at the Kodak Theatre in three weeks."

Yeah! Except if the strike is still in effect on Oscar night then none of the actors will turn up because they don't want to be seen crossing a picket line, and there won't be anyone to present or accept any awards, and nobody will have written any jokes for the opening speech. And it might go down as one of the biggest embarrassments in showbusiness history.

But on the other hand, if all that happens we won't get to see Eva Longoria gonking up and down a red carpet dressed in what looks like a seat-cover from a 1983 Ford Sierra minicab. So it probably all evens out, really.

Read more:

Oscar nominees are eating lunch in this town again - LA Times 

This weekend it emerged that a 10-tonne satellite the size of a bus will smash into Earth at 22,000mph in the next couple of weeks – leaking all sorts of hazardous substances – and nobody knows where it'll hit, putting millions at risk.

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 good news is that the striking writers aren't going to picket the Grammy awards this year, meaning that the show can go on as normal – no, wait, is that the good or the bad news?

Because now that the writers won't be picketing, we'll all be free to witness the arse-numbing, life-sapping 52-hour marathon of back-slapping, lecturing and ill-thought-out musical collaborations that the Grammys have all but copyrighted.

And one of those ill-thought-out musical collaborations will be a frankly terrifying-sounding duet between Beyonce and Tina Turner. Hold us.

The writers' strike has made a mockery of many of the things we love – like 24 and The Daily Show. It has also made a mockery of many of the things we don't particularly care about but are contractually obliged to professionally follow – like the Golden Globes and potentially the Oscars.

So it stands to reason that the writers' strike should also make a mockery of stuff we honestly can't bloody stand, like the Grammys. But nooo, apparently the Grammys are going to get off scot-free. Brilliant.

The Grammys are terrible for so many different reasons – but mostly because of the way they routinely throw random groups of musicians together to create 'happenings' that are generally as sonically appealing as listening to a distressed newborn baby jamming a vinegar-soaked javelin through a kitten's eye again and again.

Like the Sly And The Family Stone reunion at the 2006 Grammys where Steven Tyler was so busy like an idiot that nobody noticed that Sly Stone was making his first public appearance for 19 years in the background. Or the 2005 all-star rendition of Across The Universe that was so bad that it was basically a direct insult to the people of Sri Lanka.

And this year, to try and reach those insanely high peaks of dreadful taste, the Grammys will feature a duet between Beyonce and Tina Turner. People reports:

Beyonce Knowles will join forces with the legendary Tina Turner for a performance at the Feb. 10 Grammy Awards, a source close to the show confirms to PEOPLE. News of the A-list duet comes just one day after the Writers Guild of America announced it will not picket the awards show – clearing the way for stars to attend the Los Angeles ceremony. 

Perfect, a Beyonce/ Tina Turner duet is just what we've been waiting for – given the age difference and Beyonce's fondness for ripping off every single thing that Tina Turner did, chances are the performance is going to end up looking like one of those before and after posters for crystal meth addiction.

But maybe we're wrong. Maybe Beyonce and Tina Turner will pull something truly memorable out of the bag – like if Beyonce continues her trend of badly injuring herself onstage by falling off a 30-foot balcony onto her chin while Tina Turner suffers an attack of stagefright from being semi-retired for close to a decade and hallucinates that Ike Turner's ghost is chasing after her with a slice of cake until she wets herself and shorts out all the electricity to the venue. 

Alternatively Beyonce could just wail like a panicking tightrope-walker while Tina Turner sings Steamy Windows just like she did with Purple Rain when she duetted with Prince at the 2004 Grammys. We can't possibly imagine which one it'll be.

Read more:

Beyoncé & Tina Turner Will Duet at the Grammys - People 

Thanks to the writers' strike, last night's pared-down Golden Globes took the form of a news conference – like the ones appealing for the return of missing children, only bleaker.

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  

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.

Read more:

With stars dimming NBC may unplug Globes – Reuters 

Jay Leno is going about this writers strike all wrong. Here he sits with a rare opportunity to experiment in a writer-free world, and you know what he's doing? Nothing!

We happen to know for a fact that Leno has been offered the chance to neuter 15 pencil-thin Mexicans on live TV and he didn't even respond to our email! Well it looks like Jay Leno wants our neighbour across-the-street to keep breeding more Mexican baby basement slaves then, now doesn't it. You've won this round Mr. Johnson, but you can't enslave a child that isn't here!

Non existence is the ultimate freedom! 

But as much as he is impartial to the enslavement of children and probably their parents in Johnson's cellar, Jay Leno is un-impartial about the writers strike. He went back to work recently with the blessing of the Writers Guild, and delivered an impeccable monologue. The thing was so good that the Writers Guild thinks he may be using a secret writing staff and now they want to kill him forever.

We wrote that lat bit from scratch. Sweeping and powerful, right? We're not union.

When Jay Leno returned to the air, everyone thought he was gonna have to rely on his old material, like eating Doritos and telling you to eat them too, because they're so delicious and affordable and friendly. Doritos – available worldwide!

But when he went out on stage he didn't bring a single bag of chips. No – he went out there with only his wit, and some jokes he'd written for himself. He told his audience:

"I write jokes. We are following the guild thing – we can write for ourselves."

Well apparently he can't, because Patric M. Verrone, lord of the striking writers, said:

"You want a quote from me? I'll give you a quote from me – You guys are all dick-tits. There, that's a quote from me."

Wait – that wasn't Verrone that was our grandmother's third journal. It's got multiple chapters like that. Here's a real quote from Verrone:

"I can understand that there may have been some confusion for Jay about that…[but now] I made it absolutely clear that he cannot write for the show."

We're with ya Verrone! In fact we're with all th righters. We dont cair enuff to actually stop righting, but we refoos to use spel check until this hole mess is sorted out.

Until then strike, you dick-tits, strike! Luv you Gramsie!

Read More:

WGA Calls Out Leno On Monologue – Variety

The striking writers of Hollywood have decided that nobody is to write next year's Golden Globes and Oscar ceremonies, meaning that all we'll have to laugh at is whatever shriekingly awful dress Sarah Jessica Parker turns up in.

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