SAG Awards gets exemption from striking writers

By Carl DiOrio

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - The Screen Actors Guild's annual awards show will go ahead with sparkling one-liners from a Hollywood writer, after the union received a waiver from the striking Writers Guild of America on Tuesday.

SAG will be able to hire a WGA writer for its 14th annual SAG Awards at the Los Angeles Shrine Exposition Center on January 27. The ceremony will be simulcast on TNT and TBS at 8 p.m. EST/PST. Nominations will be announced December 20.

Officials from other bashes -- including the Golden Globes and Academy Awards -- are scrambling to obtain similar waivers from the WGA, which has been on strike since November 5. But Writers Guild executives were ducking the question of whether such waivers might be forthcoming.

"For the time being, it's too preliminary to forecast," a WGA West spokesman said Tuesday.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., which stages the Golden Globe Awards, was "hopeful and optimistic" a waiver would be granted, the group's president Jorge Camara said Tuesday. But the guild might not have an answer until after Globe nominations are announced Thursday morning, he added. Globe winners will be announced January 13.

It's probably not by chance that the WGA's first major script waiver went to SAG, which has been closely aligned with the WGA in its negotiating face-off with Hollywood studios.

The WGA also granted waivers covering the recent Kennedy Center Honors in Washington and an AIDS-charity event hosted by Elizabeth Taylor on the Paramount lot in Hollywood.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter