Who pulls the Golden Globes strings?

Gervais, who presents the ceremony on Sunday, was talking about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the small and motley body of international freelance journalists behind the Golden Globes. While 6,000 industry figures vote for Academy Awards (and a similar number for the Baftas) the HFPA has just 90 members, entirely responsible for final decisions.

Among their number are Alexander Nevsky, a former Russian bodybuilder; Mira Panajotovic Vukelich, an English teacher of Serbian origin, and the British jazz writer Howard Lucraft — who’s still listed as an active member at the age of 93. Turnover is slow in this exclusive club: the Egyptian columnist Mahfouz Doss joined in 1959, when Ben Hur won Best Picture.

Members write mainly for gossip sites, generating hype about the awards, and are known for their habit of getting snapshots taken of themselves with celebrities after interviews. Yet still, every year, at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, the great and the good of Hollywood come in droves to their ceremony, because a single nomination for the Golden Globes will change the course of their careers. “Very simply, the industry gets to market its films,” says the American writer Sharon Waxman, who was one of the first journalists to investigate the HFPA. “That’s the big payoff — and why everyone plays the game. They can advertise ‘Golden Globe nominated’, and the talent enjoys the evening. People can drink and hobnob during the show.”

For the world’s judges, the media circus starts even earlier. All across the industry, for the past three months, the members of Bafta and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have been bombarded with DVDs from distribution companies hoping to get a “longlist” nomination for their awards. Lobbying means everything. Rather quaintly, the US film industry still posts copies of Variety magazine containing large “for your consideration” advertisements to British Bafta voters. “I’m looking at an ad for Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer in The Last Station,” says one voter, who wishes to remain anonymous lest they “kick me off the panel”.

Bafta and Oscar voters have to watch about 250 movies to nominate the longlist, and most of them arrive bang in the middle of Christmas. “If you ask voters how many films they have seen — I mean, really seen — they might say 15,” another Bafta member admits. “That’s why these high-profile projects sweep the board. Take Avatar, for example — you’re much more likely to put that on your list than something you have to make a special effort to see. It’s a matter of man-hours and marketing.”

On Desert Island Discs Michael Caine revealed that when it comes to the Oscars he likes to vote for himself. “What if you lost by one vote?” he said . “You’d never forgive yourself. And I’ve won twice, so it works!”

Despite this rather surprising loophole, the Academy Awards remains the gold standard of voting, its method largely unchanged since 1936, with meticulous calculations (your second, third, fourth and fifth choices feed into the nominations as well as your first) and ceremonies of secrecy guarded by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

So, within such a large and apparently democratic system, how is it that a single film — Titanic, The English Patient, Slumdog Millionaire — will still sweep the board, winning in half a dozen and more categories? “Voters are not necessarily trying to spread the love,” suggests the screenwriter and Academy member John August. “If I felt a film was the best in many categories I’d give it my vote.”

But there’s another, more convincing explanation: sweeping the board, as with voters’ susceptibility to marketing, is a matter of simple human fallibility. As Kevin Maher of The Times suggests: “An actor will look for acting ability, and then tick the other crafts according to how good they thought the overall film was.” Arnold Schwarzernegger and Elizabeth Taylor, as Academy members, both have a right to vote for Oscars — but can you really imagine them sitting down on a Sunday afternoon to weigh up the options for Best Production Design?

Awards ceremonies are rigged, our Bafta voter says, “only in the sense that the public reaction is rigged”. We know exactly what kind of thing movie awards love: “Holocaust films”, as Gervais put it, and other serious, historical subjects — something that’s worth all the fuss. As for the Baftas, clearly, “one feels a sense of responsibility to look at the films of British origin. I hadn’t caught An Education until last night. Would it be on my list at this late stage if it wasn’t British? Probably not.”

Acting, meanwhile, is traditionally applauded in relation to the amount of “extravagance” that appears to have gone into it — particularly in the case of Academy Awards. Physical disability, mental illness, personal trauma, facial prosthetics ... They all look so different on the red carpet, out in the hot Hollywood sun. The Oscars rehearsal alone is a comically overblown affair — a cardboard cutout of every celebrity is placed on their seat in the Kodak Theatre so that cameramen can practise panning from face to anxious face.

While TV came to the Oscars relatively late — in its 24th year — some awards were created with the live broadcast in mind. The National Television Awards, hosted by (and largely for) ITV are, according to the TV critic Andrew Collins, “mainly a celebration of the stuff viewers already like — Ant & Dec, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, The X Factor. It’s quite clear they’re set up to advertise ITV’s underdecorated output and they serve that purpose well.”

These programmes are part of the national furniture. There are no surprises, so there’s got to be a decent show to watch on stage. We’re used to seeing the entire cast of Coronation Street tramping up to collect a single piece of Perspex; the film industry might have sent just Ken Barlow in black tie.

And what are the Brit Awards but a cavalcade of “live” adventures designed to put a big spike on the viewing figures? Set up by the BPI in 1977 to advertise the export potential of British music, the awards became known for their disastrous ad libs — Sam Fox and the autocue; Vic Reeves the “pissed bastard”, Chumbawumba’s bucket of water for John Prescott. It’s hard to remember who won what, but the incidental farces are burnt on the memory.

Elsewhere in the music world, magazine awards, according to Mark Ellen, the former Editor of Q magazine, “are largely for advertisers — creating a star-packed event makes people feel the publication has pulling power”. It is therefore essential that you get a few big names. “One year we had all the Q awards sorted,” Ellen says, “but at the eleventh hour Phil Spector announced he was coming to collect the Q Inspiration Award he’d been offered. I’d already given up and offered it to Patti Smith instead — so a one-off Special Award was hastily cobbled together for Spector and he never noticed.”

And the media machinations extend well into the world of “serious” publishing, as John Sutherland, the famously outspoken former chairman of the Man Booker Prize, is happy to testify. There are countless other literary prizes awarded in the UK each year but “no one gives a toss”, he says. “The thing about the Booker is not that it’s hugely prestigious or makes better judgments than the others or, God help us, more money, but that it’s always a kind of event, like an Irish pub on a Saturday night.”

Last year’s winner, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, a 650-page novel about Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power, sold close to 750,000 copies in hardback. “It’s a good book but very difficult,” Sutherland says. “It wouldn’t have sold 400 copies if it hadn’t been for the Booker machine.”

Awards still shift product: this is a fact. And it suggests that, even in an age when you can vote for your top amateur vocalist or ice-dancer with one call to a premium-rate number, there is still something inherently appealing in the idea of a mysterious panel of (possibly slightly aged and rather conservative) industry figures as the ultimate arbiters of the nation’s taste.

In the past five years there have been small concessions to the vox populi in the voting process, though the “fake phone-in” scandal over the ITV Comedy Awards (when callers were still being charged to vote for a prize that had already been decided) rather dented national confidence. There’s a public-voted Bafta film award (the Orange Rising Star) and another for TV (the Philips Audience Award) but shortlists are decided by industry juries.

Meanwhile, the various systems tried in America by the People’s Choice Awards demonstrate how difficult it is to quantify the things we like. The organisers of the popular culture awards originally used Gallup polls to calculate the winners, but that brought up too many ties. So they tried on-line voting, and now they’ve turned to an initiative called Visible Measures, which claims to “objectively measure online video popularity”. Ingenious, but it may well conclude that the nation’s favourite film is YouTube’s Fat Kid on Rollercoaster or Monkey Peeing in its own Mouth.

At the end of the day, no matter how predictable they are, and despite the major variation in how “fair” they may be, awards still make a tremendous difference to the people who win them. You need only watch the bizarre physical changes that overcome people when they win — the way Philip Seymour Hoffman, who swore he’d bark his acceptance speech if he ever won an Oscar, actually cried and thanked his mum, just like everyone else. For an artist, an award is an official sign that he or she has reached a plateau of critical acceptance that insulates him or her from criticism — and artists need that from time to time.

“If anything, awards are worth more now than they used to be,” says a Bafta recipient, “because there’s so much more of everything now. People in television and film are incredibly competitive. The idea that you did something better — it sort of goes back to school.”