The old joke about the Golden Globes is they can’t find a restaurant for the awards dinner because all the members are waiters. It’s fashionable for anybody with a blog, column, show, or street corner shopping cart to comment on the awards: so it’s my turn. Certainly The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), which gives out the Golden Globes, has its best days behind it. Who can forget 1981 when they all got Rolex watches from Pia Zadora’s husband and decided to award her the Golden Globe for her role in Butterfly?

That was the Hollywood that made us smile. Journalists could be bought just like anyone else. The world was in balance. The HFPA show was banned from TV after that incident, but it didn’t last. They had a good name, “Golden Globes,” a nice statuette that looked good clutched to bosoms, and a date early enough that cable TV could use the news to tub thump for the Oscars. For the last decade the HFPA’s biggest problem has been where to spend all the money.

Now there is a new problem: no press. World-class newspapers like the Zagreb Daily Star and the Kharkiv Sun are going out of business fast. The HFPA members are out of jobs. So are they still a foreign press association when the presses have stopped? Legitimate journalists who work for well-known papers in London and Paris were never welcome at the HFPA. They preferred to draw their membership from the obscure (if you couldn’t write well, at least you could wait tables well).

They may need to change the name to the HFA and forget the word “press.” Nobody would notice. The irony: 90 plus waiters, horse players, and lottery squatters who make up the HFPA pick pretty much the same winners as over 5000 supposed film professionals in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.