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LOS ANGELES - Hollywood's awards season is about to go into high gear but with no guarantee anybody will actually show up.
Several high-profile nominees for the Golden Globes, whose names were announced last week, have come forward to say they intend to sit out the 13 January awards ceremony out of solidarity with the entertainment industry's writers, who have been on strike for the past six weeks.
They include actors James McAvoy (nominated for Atonement) and Tom Wilkinson (Michael Clayton), as well as Marc Forster, who directed The Kite Runner, and Aaron Sorkin, the celebrated television writer nominated for his screenplay for Charlie Wilson's War.
"If actors can't have solidarity with writers n the people who put the words in their mouths n then who can they have solidarity with?" Wilkinson said.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association,which runs the Globes, had hoped the strike would be over by mid-January.
But the latest round of negotiations between the Writers Guild and the producers' association broke down in acrimony last week.
Even if the show does go on n at the Globes, or, a month later, at the Oscars n it will still be only a truncated awards season, without much of the usual fanfare or endless rounds of publicity plugs.
Actors and directors won't be able to appear on all of the usual TV chat show outlets, for the stark reason that many have been off the air since the strike began.
The strike, which the writers see as being little short of a battle for the future n specifically, guaranteeing a fair system of payment for content delivered over the internet and other new media outlets n has now reached a point of no return, where hopes of an early settlement have been all but dashed.
It is a huge gamble for the producers, who would ordinarily spend January commissioning pilot episodes of new shows to lead the autumn season.
A lengthy dispute is also a big risk for the Writers Guild, whose members might start to break with the leadership or simply walk away as financial hardship bites.
The longer the strike continues, though, the more damage it can do to both network programming and, over time, the quality and quantity of feature film releases.
- INDEPENDENT
