The Golden Globes will be decided by 83 well-fed junketeers of the HFPA who are idiots. So, why not vote in the Gawker Golden Globe Poll before you start throwing things at your TV?

Oh happy day, awards season has really started! The Golden Globe awards nominations have been announced, sending some hopes soaring and others to dash themselves on the rocks and die a quick death.

No looming strike will slow down this year's Golden Globe Awards, nominations for which were announced this morning with a few mildly head-cramping surprises.

The collective shrug over a possible SAG strike gathered a few more shoulders today, with representatives for Hollywood's influential Party Planning Mafia acknowledging that no labor impasse (or recession, for that matter) will prevent it from restoring the Golden Globes afterparties to their long-dormant luster. To wit: Press conferences are out, and "plasma screen-outfitted water walls" are in! And that's just for starters.

With the joyous news that the writers strike has unequivocally ended, an historic accord marked by Nick Counter and Patric Verrone appearing together on the balcony of the Warner Bros. water tower on Valentine's Day eve, as thousands below chant, "Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!" until the reluctant peacemakers finally acquiesce to a deafening roar of approval, it would seem everything is right again in the magical realm of Hollywoodland. Which makes this rumor all the more disconcerting: Could the NBC Universal ruler, whose upward-failing rise to power was prophesied in lesser-known New Testament appendix The Book of Jeff, really be mulling a lawsuit with the HFPA against the WGA for robbing them of a Golden Globes ceremony? Deadline Hollywood Daily says it could be so:

Award season is, as Sean Penn says, truly a season in hell — if, that is, one attempts to follow every twist and turn and nomination. Avoid the stress with this handy scorecard, which we'll adjust, periodically. For Golden Globe wins and Oscar nominations, we're only counting the big nine categories. No points for best soundtrack. Sorry.

During an evening lacking any sort of true (or even manufactured) sense of excitement, we found ourselves giddily mesmerized by the grainy home video that Nikki Blonsky shot of her family's reaction to the news that she had been nominated for a Globe for her work in Hairspray. After all, it's one thing to trash a hotel room, but it's another thing entirely to trash your parents' living room. In a viral video era where capturing a "real" reaction becomes harder and harder, it's impossible to argue that Nikki's spontaneous flip of the Blonsky family coffee table was anything other than a pure moment born from a rush of adrenaline and emotion. More simply put, we just paid witness to one of the most ecstatic moments of this young woman's life to date. We love everything about it, unironically and unapologetically. Now if only John Travolta were able to show this kind of range...

After a disorienting Golden Access Globes Press Hollywood Conference Awards that left nominees and audiences alike utterly befuddled (we understand Sally Field was fished out of The Grove's dancing waters fountain at 3 a.m. delivering an impassioned speech about bringing the troops home to two security guards on a golf cart), our traditional Globes parties post-mortem promised to be a similar mess. Still, if there were awards, and there were winners, by God there's going to be a reactions round-up, even if it comes off sounding a lot like the ones you read after the nominations are announced:
· The Atonement crew toasted their win at a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, where the ghost of O.D.'d John Belushi smiled over their WWII romance's win. [Variety]
· Marion Cotillard enjoyed her win for La Vie en Rose from the Four Seasons. "I'm enjoying so much what's going on here, I can't be disappointed in any way," she said, convincingly masking her extreme disappointment. [Variety]

· NBC's Billy Bush-enhanced Reading of the Golden Globes Winners telecast draws just 5.8 million viewers, lower Nielsen numbers than even last week's public-access-quality People's Choice Awards delivered to CBS. Meanwhile, the premiere of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was huge for Fox. [THR]
· Shaking off the disappointment of its Globes debacle, NBC orders another season of Proven Ratings Winner American Gladiators (surely, two episodes is all the evidence one needs to make such a commitment!), though the network is being coy about how many episodes it's ordered or when they might air. [Variety]

Though the cancellation of Golden Globes ceremony forced the Hallmark Channel to grudgingly call off its annual after-party, considered by many to be the most debauched in all of Hollywood (2006's orgy honoring Meet the Santas is still spoken of in hushed tones for the five overdosing Saint Nicks who had to be removed from a single bathroom stall at the Riot Hyatt), Globes nominee and A Grandpa for Christmas star Ernest Borgnine decided he would still try and salvage what fun he could from the wreckage of the evening, hosting an intimate gathering at his home. And Access Hollywood was there!

Once of the great tragedies of last night's decimated Golden Globes was being deprived of the opportunity to watch Entourage's Jeremy Piven, one of Hollywood's most enthusiastic awards recipients, take the stage and toe the always-difficult line between obligatory humility and "I so deserved this! This fucking show is nothing but four stoned jackasses high-fiving in a booth at Les Deux without Ari Gold!" self-aggrandizement

Dateline NBC traded in their spy cams normally used for busting Predators (not the ones from space, mind you, the ones that live next door to you) for the Vaseline-gauzed lenses required to shoot Hollywood's biggest and brightest in a two-hour Golden Globe special that aired last night after that pathetically boring Globes presser. During an interview with the universally adored Amy Adams, The Today Show's resident vixen Natalie Morales made an uncomfortable shift from friendly fluffery to attack dog journo mode when she grilled Amy Adams about her, *gasp*, former career as a waitress at Hooters. We haven't seen two girls go at it like this since Wild Things.

10:01pm: ABC, hope you were taking notes. If any of your ideas for The Oscars resemble any of the ideas that NBC utilized tonight in their sham of a "press conference," your federal broadcasting license will be revoked. Herbert Eugene Ives would've been ashamed of your performance tonight, Silverman. You should go to sleep knowing that.

Even if the cancellation of the Golden Globes and its satellite parties had been precipitated by nuclear, rather than labor, Armageddon, you could be sure that a radioactive, iridescent army of swag suite staffers would still be roaming the smoldering Hollywood hellscape, distributing designer jeans, sunglasses, and coupons redeemable for full-body laser-resurfacing procedures to any semi-recognizable survivors of the blast. Though gifting professionals initially feared that the sober climate of this crippled awards season might dissuade people from turning out to collect their frivolous wares, they soon realized that the siren call of free shit would be far too seductive to ignore:

It's a Tarnished Golden Globes One-Hour Announcement-Of-The-Winners Press Conference Extravaganza Free-For-All! The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has just revealed that NBC no longer has an exclusive on Sunday night's much-anticipated list-reading, inviting any media outlet with 60 or so free minutes and some warm bodies to spare to drop by and cover the event themselves: "After discussions with NBC, Hollywood Foreign Press Association President Jorge Camara today announced that the HFPA will have complete control of its 65th Annual Golden Globe Awards Announcement that is scheduled to take place Sunday, January 13 at 6:00 p.m. PST in the International Ballroom of The Beverly Hilton. Under the new arrangement, there will be no restrictions placed on media outlets covering the press conference." There is no word, however, if refreshments will be served to anyone who bothers to show up. [Variety]

According to the LAT's Gold Derby blog, some scandalized members within shadowy, buffet-decimating, kudos-proffering concern the Hollywood Foreign Press Association are livid that network broadcast partner NBC, hoping to salvage something from the strike-ravaged wreckage of the Golden Globes, intend to turn Sunday's one-hour press conference announcing this year's winners into an Access Hollywood-branded farce presided over by two of dinnertime TV's most recognizable faces:

OK, now the Golden Globes are really, truly, stick-them-in-the-ground-and- shovel-some-dirt-on-the-coffin dead: The E! network—whose 101 Most Awkward Red Carpet Moments Involving An Actress Being Taken Aback By Ryan Seacrest's Encyclopedic Knowledge Of High-End Women's Footwear clip-show special is a ratings winner even after years of reruns—can't even be bothered to dispatch its starving, celebrity-circling vultures to pick at whatever carrion-morsels are left on the event's bleached bones. And it gets worse:

· With the 65th Golden Globes Awards having succumbed to the strike plague, all eyes turn to its far wealthier and more powerful cousin Oscar, whose coughing up of blood into a lace handkerchief doesn't strike us as a good omen. [Variety]
· The loss of the Globes was the first real sting felt by the film industry since the start of the strike, resulting in studio executives demanding of a supposedly merciful God how He could have allowed them to go about all that For You Consideration campaigning in vain. [Variety]

· Click the above image for our video recap of last night's various acts of talk-show-host facial hair removal, in which a unibrow is plucked, a Moses-beard shredded, and a drifter-thicket shaved. At least Conan still seems committed to resisting the siren call of his razor until his writers return.
· The Carpetbagger finds the Golden Globes credentialing desk to be the loneliest place in the world.
· In this case at least, The Spy Who Licked Me doesn't refer to some kind of pornographic reimagining of 007's adventures in Her Majesty's sexy service.
· Somehow, we forgot that it's Zahara's birthday. The middle children always get lost in the shuffle.

Even though Steven Spielberg's disembodied head is still floating over the countdown timer relentlessly ticking off the minutes until Sunday night's One-Hour Golden Globes Press Conference Spectacular on the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's website (really, between the counter and Spielberg's sad little noggin, is there a more depressing corner on the internet right now?), the HFPA has announced that it's sparing the directing deity the indignity of receiving his Cecil B. DeMille award via FedEx by postponing the honor until their 2009 ceremony.