The stars will be out. The red carpet will be packed. The postshow parties will be legend.
But enough about the SAG Awards.
Sunday's Golden Globes will be precede sans pomp, circumstance and champagne-addled acceptance speeches.
The Hollywood writers' strike and attendant side effects—the promise by scribes to picket, the pledge by actors to stay away—forced the Hollywood Foreign Press this week to cancel its awards dinner and NBC to cancel its three-hour telecast.
In the show's place, TV viewers will find a news conference, a Dateline NBC special and an American Gladiators repeat.
Well, at least the picket line is still scheduled.
Writers Guild of America members are expected to be out in force at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, where a dramatic reading of the Globes winners is scheduled.
How exactly the 65th Annual Golden Globes Announcement, as NBC is now calling the "show," scheduled to air at 9 p.m. ET/PT, will play out was not known. As of Thursday morning, the publicity firm handling the Globes said everything was up in the air. A statement that might have been understatement.
On Thursday afternoon, the Los Angeles Times' award-show blog, Gold Derby, reported that Access Hollywood anchors Billy Bush and Nancy O'Dell had been floated as possible news conference, um, hosts, and quoted an unnamed TV producer as saying reporters covering the news conference wouldn't be allowed to ask questions as they would at a, you know, real news conference.
"They'll be there as captives to watch Billy and Nancy read off nominees and winners in 25 award categories," the producer told Gold Derby.
The blog subsequently updated its report with word that Hollywood Foreign Press officials were working to "limit" Bush's and O'Dell's possible roles. There was no word on how the whole freedom of the press thing was coming along.
Even later Thursday, journalist Nikki Finke, whose Deadline Hollywood Daily site has become strike-news central, wrote that she was hearing a rumor that the entire news conference would be scrapped.
For now, NBC is sticking to the schedule it unveiled earlier in the week. From 7 to 9 p.m., the network will round up stars for Going for Gold, billed as a Matt Lauer-hosted Dateline NBC special. (All of NBC's Globes coverage is being produced by its news division, an apparent, but apparently unsuccessful, attempt to discourage picketers.)
According to NBC, new interviews with Globe nominees, including Juno's Ellen Page, Hairspray's Nikki Blonsky and Atonement's James McAvoy, will be featured.
Atonement, as you'll recall, but possibly don't, is the top Globes contender among the films, with seven nominations.
For what it's worth, Las Vegas oddsmaker Johnny Avello predicts the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men will top Atonement for Best Drama. He has Juno down for Best Motion Picture, Comedy, and Big Love and 30 Rock down for Best TV Drama and Comedy Series, respectively.
Rounding out the evening of entertainment on NBC will be an "encore broadcast" of American Gladiators (10 p.m.), which fits with the Globes in that its muscled stars also could probably beat Atonement. Literally.
According to the New York Times, NBC has already lost at least two sponsors, Prudential and Citigroup, who'd signed up to advertise their wares on an actual Golden Globes ceremony, the kind with stars and acceptance speeches and stuff. The Los Angeles Times reports NBC is even considering a plan to go commercial-free for the hour.
Last year's Globes telecast averaged more than 20 million viewers for NBC. On Tuesday, a strike-afflicted People's Choice Awards on CBS averaged about 6 million viewers for CBS.
The cancellation of the Globes ceremony, meanwhile, also left E! Entertainment with holes to fill. The cable network had planned for all-day coverage, from preshow to red carpet to after-parties, all of which, including big bashes to be hosted by HBO, Warner Bros/InStyle, the Weinstein Co. and more, were nixed. (With no stars on hand to gift, even the celeb-catering backstage swag lounges, featuring goodies from the likes of L'Oréal Paris, were folded.)
In place of Globes coverage, E! will run marathons of Keeping Up with the Kardashians (4-8 p.m.) and Snoop Dogg's Father Hood (8-10 p.m.) and an all-new Girls Next Door (10 p.m.). As the Globes winners are revealed, E! News host Ryan Seacrest will break in with live updates. (E! Online is a division of E! Networks.)
The TV Guide Channel similarly redrew its Globe plans. Instead of Joey Fatone and Lisa Rinna on the red carpet that won't be in front of the Hilton, it'll be Chris Harrison and Maria Sansone in the studio with a two-hour Countdown to the Globes special at 7 p.m. The pair will return for an hourlong recap show at 10 p.m.
All things considered, the Globes has suffered leaner times, at least TV-wise. In 1979, two years after the show's network debut on NBC, the ceremony went without national coverage. And in 1983, two years after CBS gave it a second chance, it was forced to go back into syndication, where it remained until cable's TBS came along in 1989.
Of course, whether it was a ratings draw or no, the Globes always was a party. Until this year.