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 

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