The Golden Globes: Why?

A perennial question still awaiting a satisfactory answer.

The nominees for the 64th annual Golden Globe Awards will be announced at 7 a.m. Thursday (Central time). E! will carry the event live, and CNN probably will too, no doubt matching its breathless coverage of the recent release of the Iraq Study Group report, though some viewers might argue the stakes are much higher here.

The Globes: You can't stop them, you can only hope to contain them. I don't like the Globes. I find it tedious to watch inebriated celebs take awards and gift baskets from something called the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. I put no faith in the Globes' vaunted ability to predict who will win Emmy or Oscar gold.

To me, the Golden Globes sit atop a steaming heap of made-for-TV awards shows, a class even more loathsome than bottom-feeding reality shows. I say “made-for-TV” because, unlike the Oscars, the Globes and all their spawn (AMAs, People's Choice, MTV etc.) rely on television for their survival.

But give NBC credit: The network took over the Globes in 1996, put it in a prime Sunday night time, amped up the star power and promoted the telecast as a boozy, star-studded preview of the Academy and Emmy awards rolled into one. The Golden Globes telecast consistently ranks as the third most-watched awards show of the year, just behind the Grammys, and dominates the entertainment-news cycle (another TV creation) from Thanksgiving to Martin Luther King Day.

The Golden Globe Awards are chosen by an 86-member organization of mainly freelance journalists. Their reputation for picking winners is legendary -- urban legend, it turns out. In 10 major film categories last year, for instance, the foreign press only nailed half the eventual Oscar winners and missed the big one, going with the buzz for “Brokeback Mountain” instead of “Crash,” the academy's pick. The Globes didn't predict, oddly enough, what would win the Oscar for best foreign film. And they can't be counted on to forecast one of Oscar's hottest categories, documentary feature, because the foreign press doesn't vote on that.

On the TV side, the Globes are totally unreliable, in part because they're given out at midseason. “Lost” was named best drama in January. The Emmy went to “24.”

When you think about it, the idea that a group of journalists would exert influence over several thousand industry professionals seems ludicrous. The notion becomes even sillier when you take into account the caliber of journalist the foreign press association, in more or less fraternity-house fashion, admits to its ranks.

As one of my fellow ankle-biters, Sharon Waxman of the New York Times, has noted, “The association does not represent internationally renowned publications like Le Monde or The Times of London -- indeed, it has repeatedly rejected applications from a correspondent for Le Monde, while accepting applications from freelance writers from Bangladesh and South Korea.”

No one cares. All that matters are those ratings points. In one sense, I guess, the Golden Globes could be called an accurate predictor of things to come. In their total embrace of TV and shameless use of publicity, the Globes are showing us the future of all TV awards shows. The groups in charge of the Oscars, Grammys and Emmys still act as though they are professionals that deign to have their galas televised. The “members” of these “academies” put great stress on peer review and the mechanics of voting. They believe the integrity of their shows is at stake, for integrity is the one thing that keeps them just above the greasy muck where “Access Hollywood,” YouTube, Britney Spears' publicist and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, to name just a few, happily wallow.

They'll get over that someday.