Justin Timberlake just handed out the Best Song award — to “Song of The Heart” from Happy Feet. Nobody showed up to accept it. Timberlake said, “I guess Prince isn’t here so I’d like to thank the HFPA for this great honor,” or words to that effect. Commercial break as I write this….

Jennifer Hudson just won the Best Supporting Actress award at the Globes. (George Clooney announced it — no surprise in his voice when he said her name.) Her remarks: “Thank you so much, I have always dreamed but never, ever this big…thank you to the Hollywood Foreign Press for such an amazing honor. You do no know how much this does fro my confidence…because of this, it makes me feel like I’m a part of a community…it makes me feel like an actress….my thanks to Bill Condon, and I thank God for such an experience….[thanks to] Larry Mark, David Geffen. Thank you to everybody in this room! This award is for Florence Ballard….you will never be forgotten. Thank you!”

Hollywood Elsewhere is spiffed up, in position and watching a live West Coast feed of the Golden Globe awards in a secure location. I’m going to start blah-blahing and post-posting as soon as it starts. If you’re in the Pacific time zone, the winners will be posted here first, or fairly early….

1.15.07, 4:05 pm; 4:06 pm; 4:07 pm

In his boilerplate Golden Globes lead-up piece, AP reporter David Germain says “there [is] no clear front-runner for the best-drama prize, whose nominees Include The Departed, the Robert Kennedy-in-absentia tale Bobby, the suburban comic drama Little Children and the British-royalty story The Queen.” Saying there’s “no clear front-runner” is a dodge, unless I’m way off the mark. It’s The Departed, son…The Departed.

AP photo by Jeff Christensen

“Moving through a room [like the one at the Chateau Marmont, where the big pre-Globes HBO party happened last Saturday] is either the best thing you’ve ever done or a claustropho- bic’s ultimate nightmare. You exchange brief glances with strangers; their hungry eyes bounce around the room looking for famous places to land. If you’re a nobody, those eyes bounce off of you without even a smile. It’s a social dance that silently decides hierarchy.” — from Sasha Stone‘s Oscarwatch.com piece about Saturday night shenanigans, which only confirms my observation that there are very few people in this town who are less charmed by the Oscar-season party circuit action than she.

HE Golden Globe predictions: Best Drama — The Departed; Best Musical or Comedy — Dreamgirls will probably eke out a win — I have a feeling that Little Miss Sunshine and Borat aren’t strong enough to take it away; Best Director — Martin Scorsese; Best Actress, Drama — Helen Mirren; Best Actor, Drama — Forest Whitaker (although I’d rather see Leonardo DiCaprio take it); Best Actress, Comedy/Musical — Meryl Streep; Best Actor, Comedy/Musical: Sacha Baron Cohen; Best Supporting Actor: Eddie Murphy (although it really ought to be Alan Arkin…really); Best Supporting Actress — Jennifer Hudson (locked); Best Screenplay — Babel; Best Animated Feature — Cars; Best Foreign Film — Pan’s Labyrinth or The Lives of Others.

It doesn’t matter if Dreamgirls wins the Golden Globe award for Best Musical or Comedy, which may happen. The Dreamgirls downturn, which is blitzkrieging right now, began about a week and a half to two weeks ago, and I suspect that the HFPA voters weren’t as attuned to this turn in the wind when they cast their ballots as they (probably) are right now.
What I’m saying is (and I take no pleasure from writing this, being an admirer of various portions of Bill Condon‘s musical, for what that may be worth), Dreamgirls is going to lose the Best Picture Oscar no matter how it goes tonight. If it wins the Best Musical or Comedy GG award, it’s fucked. If it doesn’t win the Best Musical or Comedy GG award, it’s really fucked,
The Bagger has written that he was “at a crappy diner on La Cienega late Saturday night talking with someone, he won’t say who, and she argued that Dreamgirls was a broken toy to begin with, a grand spectacle, but with problems in the third act that left audiences feeling like it was a movie they liked just fine, but did not love.
“The Bagger still thinks that Dreamgirls might win at the Globes” — entirely possible — “and will be around for the big dance of the final five. Others doubt it will get that far.” [News to me.] “Given who its backers are and the amazing back-story of Jennifer Hudson, the movie is not going away. But it will have to get past some big scary competition — The Departed — and ferocious little competitors — Little Miss Sunshine — to get to the podium.”

“That’s what I’ve been tellin’ ya….there ain’t no freakin’ french fries”…Jack Nicholson as the voice of Jack in the Box. (Thanks to “the Bagger” for the link.)

A 1.15.07 N.Y. Times piece by Katherine Seelye and Richard Siklos quotes Time, Inc. executives saying that “while Time Inc. remains profitable, with margins of about 18 percent, it is witnessing a downturn in print advertising revenue and increasingly fierce competition from the internet .” One result, expected to happen later this week, is that “more than 150 people” are going to lose their jobs, including a big chunk of editorial staffers, as party of of a general cost-cutting move.
A friend who works at Time Inc., is going through “torture” waiting to find out if he’s going to be one of them. People in the office are on pins and needles…”going into each other’s offices, shutting the door and weeping,”
The general pruning process “is prompting big changes to the standard newsweekly formula of many correspondents contributing to heavily processed articles at magazines like Time and People. People magazine has one of the last vestiges of the classic newsmagazine reporting structure, in which several correspondents send files to a writer in New York, where stories are fact-checked by yet another department.” [Note: I remember it well!] “The new model, which is standard at most news organizations, will be for one person to report, write and fact-check the article.”
“Time Inc. is taking other steps to save money. Within a year or two, most of the company√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s corporate offices and magazines at the Time-Life Building in midtown Manhattan will have moved to lower floors so that the more valuable upper floors can be leased out. Time magazine is shutting some of its bureau buildings overseas, including in Paris, although it expects to maintain √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚Äúlaptop√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù correspondents, who can work from home.
“They’re amputating in order to save the patient,” said an executive at a competing publishing company.

The Golden Globe Awards will air tonight on NBC starting at 8 pm and run about three hours. I’m hoping to be in a favored position somewhere in the Beverly Hilton complex (I think) and posting as it all happens in actuality, which is to say starting at 5 pm Pacific, If my plan fails I’ll just be chasing after the winners on a category-by-category basis like everyone else (Oscarwatch.com‘s Sasha Stone is pretty fast on her feet in this regard), but without the particular observational eyeball stuff.

I’ll definitely be going to four or five of the post-Globes parties — Paramount/DreamWorks, Weinstein Co., Warner Bros./InStyle, 20th Century Fox, Universal. And I’ll try and throw in observations and photos as I move from event to event. Maybe…if there’s easy wi-fi. At the very least I’ll post all this stuff when I get home tonight. Or tomorrow morning.

“Independent bloggers can laugh all they want about the imperious posture of the mainstream media, but I and others at the N.Y.Times have never been more in touch with readers’ every robustly communicated whim than we are today. Not only do I hear what people are saying, but I also care.
“Sometimes I wonder whether I care to the point that I neglect other things, like, oh, my job. Tweaking the blog is seductive in a way that a print deadline never is. By the time I am done posting entries, moderating comments and making links, my, has the time flown. I probably should have made some phone calls about next week’s column, but maybe I’ll write about, ah, blogging instead.” — from David Carr‘s weekly N.Y. Times media column (1.15), this one titled “24-Hour Newspaper People.”