E verybody in Hollywood knows the Golden Globes are a farce. But does anyone care, and should they?

TV has turned the Globes from an insiders' affair into an international showbiz extravaganza in the past decade or so. NBC has exclusive telecast rights, paying the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and Dick Clark Productions a reported $6 million (U.S.) annually for the privilege.

But what NBC is buying, and millions are watching (although fewer recently), is the proverbial silk purse made out of a sow's ear. The Golden Globes is a huge ceremony – presented as serious film and TV awards – that's tightly controlled by a tiny group whose credentials are often sketchy at best. The event is really a Hollywood love-in staged by star-struck fans at a dinner flowing with booze and oinking with fine food.

The 91 star-worshipping members of the HFPA, the most elite club in Tinseltown, are coddled because they play a major role in helping celebrities and power players get what they really want: an Oscar nomination.

The annual Globes bunfeed and broadcast, which rolls again on Sunday, comes as the nearly 5,800 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are filling out their Oscar nomination ballots. Academy members watch the Globes along with everyone else, and they can't help but be influenced by winners, tearful acceptance speeches and general levity.

Current HFPA members include real-estate agents, car salesmen, showbiz publicists, hairdressers and even a few journalists. All that is required to maintain membership is permanent residence in Southern California (so much for "foreign") and a mere four published articles per year, often in obscure publications that aren't freely disclosed.

The HFPA pretends to be a democratic operation, but it operates mainly in the dark, revealing only the names and the 55 countries represented by its members. (There are four Canadian members, one of whom, Ray Arco, also represents Denmark.)

Membership is strictly kept below 100, making it easier for studio publicists to court them with dinners, private screenings and valuable one-on-one celebrity interviews. New recruits are added rarely and only with the sponsorship of two active HFPA members. Any single member can blackball an applicant for whatever reason.

With all that lovely NBC loot, the association is able to pay for numerous perks, including two all-expenses-paid trips per year to film festivals anywhere in the world for each and every member.

The HFPA was created in 1943 by eight foreign journalists living in Hollywood, who were frustrated by their lack of access to top stars. They reasoned that creating their own awards might turn things around, and that thinking paid off.

"(The Globes) are a non-event raised to epic proportions by Dick Clark getting them a network television slot," said David Poland, editor of Movie City News, a widely read Hollywood industry blog.

Yet Poland isn't inclined to criticize the HFPA for being so good at getting what it wants. "Oddly, I feel as though beating up on the members misses the point. They are just people riding a very nice train. ... If someone told you that you could retire 85 per cent of the way and still get free travel every week you like, some of it at-will trips to exotic places to see every major star and to be treated like royalty after never being treated particularly well as a journalist in your real career, how could you say `No'?"

Poland's view is the prevailing one in Hollywood. There's a certain amount of admiration for how the HFPA has turned itself from a shunned group of outsiders into a courted coterie.

The HFPA and the Golden Globes are now such an important part of the Oscar campaign process that major press outlets are often pushed to one side so the Globes voters can spend some quality time with the likes of George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Meryl Streep.

At the press junket for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in December 2008, journalists who had flown to Los Angeles from around the world had to make do with interviews from secondary stars of the film, because stars Pitt, Cate Blanchett and director David Fincher were spending all their time currying HFPA favours.

Los Angeles Times columnist Patrick Goldstein takes a simpler approach than David Poland. He sees the Globes as "Hollywood's ultimate guilty pleasure" simply because nobody takes them seriously.

They are dumb fun, he wrote recently: "I suspect the Globes owe their robust health less to their value as an award season barometer than to the fact that everyone in Hollywood, even the eye-rolling studio executives who privately ridicule the group's tiny cadre of obscure international journalists, enjoys the idea of having an award show that is as raucous and silly as the Academy Awards is stuffy and tame."

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The one thing that can be said about the HFPA is that it is not quite as bogus as it used to be. It cracked down on some of the more egregious aspects of the organization, such as the luxury watches and other freebies that were handed out in years gone by. And the association donates a sizeable portion of its NBC windfall to various film-related charities, which further adds to its growing appeal.

You also have to wonder, in fairness, if people should really care about how the HFPA conducts itself, if they yawn at other democratic infringements that are of far greater import. The people of Canada offer an example of such flexible morality. Millions of them apparently aren't all that bothered that the Conservative government just shut down Parliament when it was about to face some tough questions, so why should they or anyone else get excited over a Hollywood awards ceremony being less than lily-white?

But does it really come down to this? That it's okay to be just a little bit dirty, as long as the glitter hides the grime? We'll just keep right on swinging that pig's-ear purse, which gets bigger, silkier and more glitzy by the year.