In which January's all about frock and lol

Naturally, as a woman with functioning faculties and a passing interest in gauzy fabric, I love awards season. What more does one need to brighten the bleak, bitter mornings of January and February than the excuse to sit at one’s computer with a frothy coffee typing, “Amy Adams sideboob” into the internet for an hour? The hits, the misses, the turns and the tumbles. The opportunity to find out, once and for all, what the purpose of Taylor Swift is. It’s all such a jolly promise.

But the truth is that like karaoke parties, sashimi or movies starring Katherine Heigl, awards season is one of those slightly disappointing things you’ve always forgotten your disappointment at by the time the next one rolls around.

No sooner had I woken up, opened half an eye, reached for my laptop and groggily googled, ‘Gplden gLobes reD carpt’ than I remembered why I always finish the winter feeling vaguely dissatisfied by the world (it is definitely awards season, not all the refined carbohydrates and slipper socks).

Hollywood just doesn’t know how to choose a nice frock anymore. It’s as though sheer affluence has overwhelmed our stars to the point where they can’t tell, ‘pretty’ from ‘looks like something I once did with tin foil to punish my Barbie’. Armies of stylists and hoards of designers toil for months to achieve what any of the rest of us could manage with two hours, a Debenhams giftcard and some double-sided tape.

They tend to fall largely into three categories. Predictable but dull, which means anything Reese Witherspoon wears; original but odd, which involves a lot of peplums, high necklines and hair that has been woven into its own weather-proof hat; and half-dressed, which means the sort of kidney-chilling flesh exposure that might lead normal folk to assume your outfit was half stolen by tinkers on the way to the ceremony.

It’s a good job then, if we don’t have the frocks, that we do have the funnies. If you’ve not watched Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s opening duologue from the Golden Globes, do it now. From quipping that Gravity was “the story of how George Clooney would rather float away into space and die than spend one more minute with a woman his own age,” to August: Osage County "proving that there are still great parts in Hollywood for Meryl Streeps over 60," the whole thing was a perfectly-pitched delight.

Here’s a plan, perhaps: while the comedy giantesses take the stage by storm, we could leave the red carpet to the men – who with the occasional exception of a jazzy bowtie or lumberjack beard, have been consistently letting the side down for decades. “What were they THINKING?” the magazines can scream, over photos of Matt Damon and Colin Firth in aquamarine lamé with daring necklines. That would see me through until March just nicely.