For all of us awards nuts, the most tragic aspect of a possible strike by the Screen Actors Guild is revealed in this sentence in yesterday's L.A. Times report: "Guild leaders are expected to time any walkout to disrupt the Golden Globe Awards and Academy Awards — in January and February, respectively."

Uh, oh! Oh, here we go again? Maybe not. Don't despair ... yet. In order for a SAG strike to happen, the walkout must be OK'd by three-quarters of guild members who vote in the upcoming referendum. Actors just went back to work earlier this year after the writers' guild strike finally ended in February — just days before the Oscars ceremony. Are they willing to forfeit paychecks again so soon?

Recent actions by SAG leadership to get a better deal out of the studios isn't widely supported across Hollywood because guild chiefs are rejecting terms roughly equal to the ones accepted recently by the writers' and directors' guilds — plus SAG's sister union AFTRA. It's one thing for SAG to try to get more money. The guild can't be faulted much for that, eh? But to shut down Hollywood production so soon after the last industry strike so that those notoriously pampered actors can get better terms than everybody else recently negotiated — well, you can imagine how popular that's going to be around town!

SAG leaders are probably asking members to vote on a possible strike because it's their only face-saving ploy at this point. Having failed to make the studios cough up more dough in recent months, their only other option is to buckle and accept defeat. Better that they defer to members to make that concession for the whole guild.

Illustration by Tom O'Neil