Close your eyes and join hands with me. Deep breath now. Hold it, hold it. Let us pray. Let us pray that the Hollywood writers' strike goes on for long enough to result in the cancellation of every 2008 awards ceremony from the Oscars to the Emmys, giving us a year entirely free of red carpets, gift bags, acceptance speeches, celebrity self-congratulation and Alec Baldwin in a tuxedo.

We might not have to pray too hard. With the members of the Writers Guild of America still marching outside desert studio lots while refusing to plot any more Bionic Woman episodes, Hollywood is out of business. As they say here in the industry, it is in “turnaround”. Which means there will be no one to write the skits for the Golden Globes ceremony in January or, more importantly, for the Oscars telecast a month later.

Worse still, it means that the nominees will have to barge their way through writers' picket lines to attend the show. Or rather they won't: after all, the actors and directors' unions are also about to renegotiate their studio contracts and no one wants to be a celebrity scab. Just look at what happened to poor old Ellen DeGeneres.

Unless the executives at ABC television manage to pull off a YouTube Oscars — with the skits performed by animated snowmen and toilet-flushing cats — it seems that in all likelihood the show will not go on. Pretty remarkable, given that the ceremony survived the Depression, Pearl Harbor and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan (in the latter case it was delayed by one day).

For the non-unionised Hollywood correspondent, of course, all this means one thing: holiday. Lots of holiday. But there are other reasons why the thought of a year without any awards ceremonies fills me with cheer. It's not that movies don't deserve to be praised, it's just that when the praise becomes an industry — and is arranged several months in advance — it loses its meaning. After all, no matter what the quality of Hollywood's output in any given year, something has to win. And the investment in the awards machine is such that entire movies are written, green-lit and released with Academy voters in mind. They're the equivalent of those interminable five-part, 30,000-word articles produced by large metropolitan American newspapers solely to impress the Pulitzer board. It's all very grand and well meaning, but it also encourages people in the industry to forget whom they're working for: the public.

Sometimes even very talented people need a sit-down and a stiff talking-to, not a golden statue and an acceptance speech. This is one of those years: box-office sales are down, with revenues up only because of ticket-price inflation. And yet the writers and the studios remain convinced that the public will sit around and wait for them to stop feuding. It takes a certain amount of arrogance to think that way. The kind of arrogance, perhaps, that only eight decades of self-congratulation could produce.

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