Let’s start with the bad news: The Golden Globes ceremony has been cancelled.
Now the good news. Well, actually that was the good news. But here’s the more news: There’ll be a press conference instead!
The Globes ceremony had seemed doomed for some time, owing to the writers’ strike and the subsequent Screen Actors’ Guild announcement that stars would boycott the show if it aired on NBC. Variety has the rundown of the bizarre chain of compromises that led the network, desperate to air something in primetime on Jan. 13, to remake the event as… a one-hour primetime press conference. Because if there’s one thing people love more than a bloated awards show, it’s a press conference! The event, Variety says, will be presented under the auspices of NBC News–which is great, because I’m sure Brian Williams needs a break from having to pronounce all those hard names of places in Pakistan.
Here’s hoping the Academy Awards improves on this and decides to air three hours of Oscars being forged in the smelter at the statuette factory.