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:

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.

The complicated family dynamic between Miss Golden Globe Dakota Johnson and famous mom Melanie Griffith that first unfolded on stage during the Globes ceremony seemed to further develop in front of the wire service firing squad on the way to the after-parties. Stopping to momentarily bathe in the shower of flashbulbs en route to the Warner Bros/InStyle bash, Griffith seemingly clings both to the daughter growing up too fast and to her own past as the HFPA's designated mannequin. Young Dakota, acutely feeling the maternal drag on the spotlight of her petulant Hollywood coming out party, grants her a mere split-second of embrace, then slips away, leaving the proud/jealous woman through whose birth canal she once so happily passed grasping at fingertips.

· 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:

Last night's Golden Globes red carpet was so glutted with talentless microphone jockies that we were tempted to virtually slash the vocal cords of the Dean Cains, Ryan Seacrests, Maria Menounoses, and Debbie Matenopouli with the mute button and substitute our own imagined mindless banter with the celebrities who clearly couldn't be bothered to engage with them. But out of the inept phalanx of "Who are you wearing?" monkeys emerged a new red carpet star in E!'s Isaac Mizrahi, who used the disarming smokescreen of his designer-grade flamboyance to ask Eva Longoria to hold forth about the disposition of her pubic hair (she demurred, though allowed that she's spray-tanned all over), to grope both Teri Hatcher and Scarlett Johansson (above; Hatcher pretended to be scandalized), and generally inject some loopy inappropriateness into the proceedings well before Harrison Ford's first drink. (Well, his first drink at the venue. Outside of the limo. And not out of a flask.) Mizrahi is, quite frankly, nothing short of a hero, and the fingers he used to caress Johansson's ample bosom should be immediately removed and bronzed for posterity.

If the Emmys are Oscar's crayon-eating little brother, then the Golden Globes are its developmentally disabled cousin from abroad, who somehow manages to coat his mouth in paste, then devour half of the innards of your favorite down pillow while you're busy child-proofing your open electrical outlets. And like that distant relative who pops in once a year (a Christmas here, a funeral there), you're obligated to sit and pretend to be entertained for a few hours as he wheezes out the occasional sticky feather. Think we're exaggerating? Stop what you're doing, go back to the TiVo, and replay the first five minutes of last night's broadcast, an introductory montage of red carpet arrivals set to a "special" version of the already dangerously insipid Pussycat Dolls song "Don't Cha." If you don't find yourself rummaging around the kitchen for a blender large enough to fit around the human head by the time they sing, "Don't cha love that Russell can throw left hooks"/Don't cha know the cowboy with his good looks?" you're far more generous souls than we are.

It's been a big week for anyone curious about the shadowy inner workings of Hollywood's most celebrated cabalistic institutions. First, the LAT gets inside the bizarro world of Scientology's desert Cruise-courting compound, and today comes a NY Times report on the suicide of Irish-born showbiz reporter and one-time Hollywood Foreign Press Association member Nick Douglas. The Golden Globe-mounting international starfucking consortium put Douglas on a 17-month probation for various petty violations, including walking out of an MGM party with some unopened beers (have we mentioned he's Irish-born?) and selling a Tom Selleck photo to a tabloid, forcing him to return to his native Dublin, where, denied of his life-affirming junkets and movie star photo-ops, some maintain he became so despondent he hanged himself to death. The report takes a look at some other regrettable past incidents involving members of the Foreign Press, including one involving HFPA president himself, Philip Berk:

It seems no awards season news can begin without a discussion of gay cowboy fireside tale Brokeback Mountain. Early this morning, Brokeback piled up seven Golden Globe nominations, with best drama, best director, and best actor nods among them. But the Hollywood Foreign Press quite callously split up the movie's heartsick cowpokes, celebrating sensitive monosyllabic mumbler Heath Ledger while snubbing dreamy-eyed, bull-riding (SPOILER ALERT!) bottom Jake Gyllenhaal. It seems that even the Globes are conspiring to keep these star-crossed lovers apart.