Golden Globe winner Cate Blanchett sent her no-show regrets.
(GABRIEL BUOYS/AFP)
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - The Hollywood writers strike took the glitz, the glamour, and roughly two-thirds of the audience from this year's Golden Globe Awards.
NBC's no-frills, one-hour presentation of the winners Sunday night drew a 4.8 rating and 7 share, according to preliminary estimates from the nation's 55 largest metered markets by Nielsen Media Research.
That left NBC fourth in the hour, behind CBS' miniseries "Comanche Moon," ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," and the Fox comedies "Family Guy" and "American Dad." For the hour, "Comanche Moon" had almost twice the audience as the NBC awards announcement, Nielsen said Monday.
Last year, the Golden Globes ceremony on NBC had a 16.0 rating and 23 audience share, Nielsen said. A ratings point represents 1,128,000 households, or 1 percent of the nation's estimated 112.8 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show.
Nielsen didn't have an estimate of how many people actually watched the show on NBC or on other networks that carried the winners' announcement.
Unlike the writers strike, Hollywood's first big awards show was over in a flash, with no key winners, no stars in sight, and no real fun for showbiz fans.
The Golden Globes honored such films as the tragic romance "Atonement," the crime saga "No Country for Old Men," and the bloody musical "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street."
Yet no one film gained critical momentum that might set it ahead of the pack for the Feb. 24 Academy Awards, and a compressed Globes show highlighted what a joyless Hollywood awards season it's been.
The two-month-old strike by the Writers Guild of America scuttled the big celebrity bash at the 65th annual Globes, which was replaced by a bizarre and speedy news conference to announce recipients, without any winners around to gush their thanks.
"I wish circumstance would allow me to be there," Cate Blanchett, the supporting-actress prize winner for the Bob Dylan tale "I'm Not There," said in a statement.
With the Globes left in shambles, everyone in Hollywood was left wondering if the same fate might befall the town's big prizes come Oscar night.
"I just hope this whole thing gets cleared up before the Academy Awards," because it would really be a tragedy if a similar fate transpired for them," said Richard Zanuck, producer of "Sweeney Todd," which won best musical or comedy.
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