Canadian-born screenwriter/director/producer James Cameron won the top Best Drama prize at the Golden Globe awards last night, also scooping up the Best Director award for Avatar. Already shattering a series of box office records, the breakthrough 3-D picture could replace Cameron’s Titanic as the highest-grossing film in history.

Cameron told the audience that the aim of Avatar is to remind us that “everything is connected, all human beings and the Earth.” Sounds like a concept he might have come up with smoking pot in his youth, when he worked as a truck driver and spun his first fantastic scripts.

Meryl Streep picked up a record seventh Golden Globe for Julie & Julia Streep was also nominated for It’s Complicated, which made headlines when it was slapped with an “R” rating for depicting pot smoking without negative consequences. Streep has smoked pot on film before, in Silkwood (1983), and she did her usual stellar performance getting high by sniffing an orchid extract in Adaptation (2002). In 1985 Streep portrayed Danish author/hashish smoker Isak Dinesen in Out of Africa.

Jeff Bridges got a standing ovation when his name was announced for Best Performance by an Actor in a Drama. Bridges, who achieved cult status as the pot-smoking “dude” in The Big Lebowski (1988), won instead for playing an alcoholic country singer in Crazy Heart. – Drama. Bridges told USA Today in 2008 he was, like the Dude, a major pothead. ”Oh yeah. Big time. That part of my life was in the past.” (Which is actually a double negative.)

Bridges went up against cannabis fan Morgan Freeman (Invictus). “Never give up the ganja. “It’s God’s own weed,” Morgan told an interviewer from UK’s The Guardian in April 2003. Freeman has reportedly been spotted at Vancouver’s Blunt Brothers.

Reformed polydrug user Robert Downey Jr. won Best Actor in a Comedy for Sherlock Holmes. Both Arthur Conan Doyle and his character Sherlock Holmes used cocaine, back in the day when Sigmund Freud was prescribing it. Like his fellow nominee Matt Damon, Downey puffed pot with his Dad as a youngster. Human/environmental rights activist Woody Harrelson was also nominated for his role in The Messenger.

Emily Blunt (nice name) was up for the Best Actress in a Drama award for The Young Victoria, portraying the monarch at about the age she would have been prescribed cannabis for her menstrual cramps by Sir John Russell Reynolds.

On the small screen, party girl Drew Barrymore won for her more serious role in the HBO film Grey Gardens, and AMC’s “Mad Men,” which has depicted pot smoking, won for best series.

Presenting awards were pot puffers Harrison Ford, Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Aniston. Also in the house was the ever-popular marijuana fan Paul McCartney, who was nominated for his song “I Want To Come Home” from the film Everybody’s Fine.

“You want attention? Sit next to Paul McCartney,” proclaimed Julia Roberts as she took the stage to present Cameron’s award. “I’ve never had so many texts in my life.”

Ellen Komp is an activist and writer who manages the website VeryImportantPotheads.com.