In the end, Lionsgate's plan to buy themselves a SAG award by sending out an unprecedented 130,000 Crash screeners to every living SAG member (last paying gig Thug #3 on Magnum P.I.? You get a screener!) proved to be a winning strategy, as the movie took a best film ensemble trophy at yesterday's SAG awards. Shut out of the proceedings was Brokeback Mountain, a clear message from voters that it requires more actorly skill to pretend to be racist than it does to pretend to be gay. Other winners included Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote, Reese Witherspoon for Walk the Line, the cast of Lost for best ensemble TV drama and, in a turn of events sure to have resulted in Ari Emanuel launching a plate of Chinese food at his plasma screen, the cast of Desperate Housewives for best ensemble TV comedy.

Coming out of the closet is a deeply personal journey for a gay individual, often a gradual process involving much soul searching and courage. Sometimes, however, that process is inadvertently helped along by a third party, such as the flappy-lipped TV exec who outed Crumbs creator Marco Pennette to his family on a red carpet:

If we may briefly steal your when-gays-meet-awards attention away from Brokeback's Oscar prospects for just a moment, we'd also like to note that GLAAD announced its 17th Annual Media Awards nominations today. We'd particularly like to direct your gaze to the "Outstanding TV Journalism — News Segment" category. For that one, the nominees are:

· The in-heat dogs of the big studios' specialty films divisions are ready to begin their horny rampage through Park City today, where Sundance has offered its unprotected leg for humping by pledging "smaller, more-indie flavored fare" (read: more cheaply acquired movies) at this year's festival. [Variety]
· Hey, did you hear the one about specialty divisions descending on Sundance in hopes of snapping up "smaller-scale indie fare"? [THR]
· The Constant Gardener leads the BAFTA nominations with ten, but the Brits love George Clooney like a fat kid loves cake, as he's nominated four times for two different films. [Variety]
· Bryce Dallas Howard (Ron Howard's daughter! Yay!) in negotiations to star as Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker's love interest, in Spider-Man 3. [THR]
· The PGA's recent producing-credit purge leaves producers Bob Yari, Don Cheadle, and co-writer Bobby Moresco in danger of Oscar podium exile should Crash win best picture. Of course, should Crash win best picture, we should all probably put aside such selfish considerations and be more concerned about the apocalyptic deluge of flaming snakes that will end life on Earth as we know it. [Variety]

When Syriana writer-director Stephen Gaghan finally got around to reviewing his Oscar ballot yesterday, he was alarmed to discover that his screenplay, which he maintains was largely based on Robert Baer's memoir See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, was reclassified by the Academy from an adapted to an original work:

The Drudge Report, your always-on source for breaking news about the Oscar race, screams the above headline touting a supposed sibling psychodrama unfolding at Universal, where a source accuses studio head Stacey Snider of being way more into gay cowboys than Israeli hitmen:

The entire viewership of the Golden Globes could easily second-guess Drew Barrymore's decision to go braless during her presenting duties, but JV NY Daily News gossip Lloyd Grove called in a plastic surgeon for his expert opinion on Barrymore's breasts:

Today's Page Six throws a harsh light on a profound tragedy that struck the Golden Globes, one that had seemingly escaped notice until now:

Despite our prayers that all Golden Globes coverage had ceased at the close of business yesterday, more HFPA-related fun was still trickling out from other outlets after we signed off yesterday. Over at The Envelope, Richard "Kudos Crasher" Rushfield filed his man-in-the-ballroom report, capped with this fascinating, claustrophobic exchange between handsy red carpet loose cannon Isaac Mizrahi and bite-sized DreamWorks mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg:

· The chain of causality has been firmly established: Sneak a burger during an awards ceremony, get your wife pregnant.
· Despite our best attempts to ignore it, crazy-ass life goes on outside of awards season. For example, PETA is upset about what it considers subpar conditions for Michael Jackson's menagerie at Neverland, yet doesn't seem at all concerned about the abandoned packs of Cub Scouts roaming the grounds in search of food and living in the rusty ferris wheel.
· Still more lingering awards-related business: Army Archerd is stepping down as red carpet greeter at the Oscars. Seacrest obviously has incriminating photos.
· There's no reason why a canceled ESPN show should make us feel better about life, but somehow the death of the ESPN Hollywood abomination does just that.
· Shatner daily double! Big Billy Style sells a kidney stone for charity, will host the Golden Groundhog Awards.

Today's orgy of Golden Globes coverage has left us crumpled in a heap underneath our desk, feeling unsatisfied and more than a little used. (We can almost hear members of the HFPA swapping crude stories about the unflattering noise we make when someone nibbles on our earlobe.) Sure, you're already aware of who took home the prizes, but no awards package worth its weight in garish, gold-plated statuettes would be complete without a round-up of various websites' lists of last night's winners:

The Golden Globes, as it turns out, were pretty good to The Gays, with Brokeback Mountain, Capote and Transamerica taking home the lion's share of the major awards. So welcome have these portrayals of the previously marginalized been and in particular, Brokeback's unflinching gaze upon two (ick!) masculine, sexually active men in love that some are going so far as to call last night's ceremony a "watershed" moment in the history of gay social acceptance:

Tucked inside a bumper you probably fast-forwarded through between Walk the Line's win for best musical or comedy picture and Lost's dramatic TV series triumph was this blink-and-you-missed it shot of Russell Crowe chowing on a burger (shades of Hilary Swank's iconic, celebratory post-Oscar Astroburger immediately came to mind—is there no "I'm just a regular person" awards show moment not tied to Ms. Swank?), a snack apparently delivered to Crowe's table in a telltale, off-the-menu Styrofoam container. We're relieved to see the legendarily roughneck actor enjoying a man-of-the-people nosh; after all—and we're sure Crowe would be the first one to tell you this—the official Globes second course of Chilean sea bass is for the pussies sitting in the TV section.

It's not that the special Golden Globes remix of that Pussycat Dolls song that kicked off the ceremony was too hard to understand to make an accurate transcription. On the contrary, the starving studio musicians (please tell us that the Dolls aren't already starving to death) that NBC forced into this ritualized awards show humiliation were admirably intelligible as they warbled tributes to the arriving stars. Our failure to scribble down the altered lyrics had more to do with the fact that we were so distressed by the odd sensation of the warm trickle of blood that issued forth from our eardrums after realizing they really did sing "Don’t ya dig the bling on the robes tonight?" that we went looking for a towel to stanch the flow, aborting our mission before it even began. Luckily for everyone, blogger Josh Horowitz's auditory canal is made of heartier stuff:

Anyone who sat through last night's Golden Globes telecast felt crippling, vicarious embarrassment on behalf of presenter Dennis Quaid, whose soon-to-be infamous "chick flick" joke will surely go down in the storied history of awards show misfires. Our transcription of Quaid's doomed introduction of Brokeback Mountain:

The single biggest complaint about last night's Golden Globes ceremony seems to revolve around His Dreaminess' jarring absence from the Brokeback lovefest. So let's get your twisted awards seasons priorities straight, Jake: Palm Springs International Film Festival, yes, Golden Globes, no? And don't give us this "I wasn't nominated" crap. Who else could we have counted on to pull a Phillippe if Heath had won? Michelle Williams? She would have trouble tackling a roll of soggy paper towels.

· Not so fast, Glory Road! The Weinstein Co.'s Hoodwinked squeezes past Jerry Bruckheimer's uplifting basketball flick at the MLK holiday weekend box office. [Variety]
· David Chase says this is the last season of The Sopranos, no matter how much money HBO throws at him to stretch out the series into "bonus" mini-seasons. No, for real this time! [THR]
· CBS Corp. officially changes the name of its studio arm to CBS Paramount Television. Meanwhile, Brad Grey is considering starting a new TV division over at the real Paramount, which we're sure will be something suitably retaliatory, like Paramount Pictures' Fuck CBS TV. [Variety]
· X-Files creator Chris Carter sues 20th Century Fox TV for breach of contract, contractual interference and other claims over funds he claims to be owed. He alleges that 20th reneged on their deal because the terms were "too favorable" to Carter, i.e., they forgot to include the proper, obscure contract language to thoroughly but legally screw him out of money. [THR]
· Moving the Golden Globes to Monday to avoid the oncoming Nielsen freight train of Desperate Housewives pays off, with NBC winning the night despite a challenge from 24. [Variety]

Like spoiled, scheming daddy's girls with Sweet 16s falling on the same night, the various studios threw out all the stops to lure the popular kids to their Golden Globes bashes. Since all the events took place somewhere in the Beverly Hilton, however, party hopping was as easy as stumbling into an elevator and pressing a button; you just had to be prepared to find a collapsed Paris Hilton with a half-deflated nitrous balloon in her lips when the doors opened. A Golden Globes party round-up:

Backstage at the Golden Globes, Brokeback Mountain's success, George Clooney's early win for Syriana, and an awards show press corp utterly unafraid to ask the most inane of hypothetical questions combined for this well-shaken nonsense cocktail:

We received a tip late yesterday about some seemingly inconsequential new Hollywood awards show, the Golden Groundhog Awards. Set for February 2, the Groundhogs are designed, according to the promotional website, to "recognize genuinely outstanding films from the previous year that lacked the distribution and marketing support needed to propel them into the public consciousness." That is to say, they must have grossed less than $1 million worldwide.