The WGA has made it clear that it is prepared to picket the Oscars. But will putting a picket line outside the Oscars be the WGA's D-day or its Waterloo? If SAG's top stars stay away, will an actor-less Oscars really put the hurt on the studios, depriving ABC of its biggest payday of the year, or will it cause a backlash, since many movie fans will wonder how punishing the academy's noble efforts to honor good work helps the union cause?





It's a move fraught with peril. The WGA is now in a position of nervously sitting on the sidelines, wondering how tough a deal the Directors Guild of America will negotiate with the studios. But if the guild seems bent on undercutting the Oscars, how much help will it get from DGA negotiation committee chairman Gil Cates, who also happens to be -- ahem -- the producer of the show?

The union leaders are convinced they aren't overplaying their hand.

"I understand how meaningful awards can be to a lot of people -- I was nominated for an Emmy once, in the last century," Rosenberg says. "I'm sure we'll take some heat. But if the Writers Guild is picketing, we will follow their lead. I'm assuming no one will be crossing the picket line. You certainly won't see me on the red carpet. I know it's the Oscars, but we're taking a stand -- the bigger the event, the greater the impact."

It's always possible that the academy, worried about the prospect of putting on a show without any recognizable Oscar recipients, could broker a compromise, perhaps offering airtime to promote the guild or donating some of its revenue from the show to a guild strike fund.

But there is also a sizable contingent of Hollywood pessimists who believe that if the Oscars go off the rails, it will only provoke more intransigence from the industry's top dogs, who already view the guilds with thinly veiled contempt. As one of the studio chiefs I spoke to this week complained, the WGA is great at being bombastic but lousy at negotiating.

But it's hard to take studio charges seriously when they were the ones who walked away from the negotiations, unwilling to make any significant concessions on writer participation in new media revenues.

Seeing the kind of alliance the WGA has forged with SAG, I wonder if the all-powerful studios, accustomed to picking off the guilds one by one, will discover that solidarity is more than just a tidy slogan.

As this week's events have shown, the guilds have some weight to throw around too.

"The Big Picture" usually appears Tuesdays in Calendar. E-mail questions or criticism to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.