The no-show must go on

AS Top 40 radio is fond of reminding us, you never realize how much you love something until you lose it. In recent years, the Golden Globes takedown has become a required screed of the media. The show, we gripe, has become too over-hyped, too glitzy, too darn full of itself. What is it, really? The preferences of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., a handful of journalists known for leaving screenings when there aren't snacks.

Now, in the cold, bleak aftermath of a strike-stricken Golden Globes, we are left with the queasy anguish of regret -- how could we have ever taken the star-studded booze-fest at the Beverly Hilton for granted?

For those of you who wisely spent the evening rearranging your sock drawers or watching your TiVo queues of reruns, it was a less than magical night. Um, evening. OK, hour or actually 35 minutes depending on which network you chose to watch the awards . . . announcement.

KCBS, E!, CNN and TV Guide went bare-bones, airing the HFPA news conference, which clocked in at a nominee name-rattling 35 minutes, while NBC got a little fancier, enlisting the talents of Billy Bush and Nancy O'Dell and a lot of film clips to create what played like an award-show farce on YouTube. "Wayne's World," meet the Globes.

I cannot stress this strongly enough: We must never let this happen again. Gil Cates, producer of this year's Academy Awards, if you are reading this, I don't care if you have to kidnap every member of the studio alliance and lock them in with the WGA until the two sides reach a deal, but you cannot let anything remotely like this happen to the Oscars. Cancel them if you must, or inform the winners by mail, because the only thing worse than all the over-hyped, over-covered awards shows the media loves to hate is the stripping bare of the process. You know something has gone seriously wrong when even wins by Daniel Day-Lewis and Julie Christie seem somehow diminished, their names just, well, names on a meaningless list.

Daniel Day-Lewis! Julie Christie! We need the exclamation points!

It becomes, actually, a philosophical question: If a winner is announced to the absence of applause, does anyone hear it? Not when that silence is immediately filled by the bloviations of Billy Bush. "You know, I thought it would be Amy Ryan," he said one beat after Cate Blanchett was announced as the winner of best supporting actress while calling Javier Bardem's win "a no-brainer. He's one of the best villains ever, right up there with Darth Vader." Javier, try to contain your gratitude.