The tragic romance Atonement was named Best Drama at a Golden Globes event that was deflated from star-studded revelry to dry, news conference-style awards announcement because of the Hollywood writers’ strike.

The bloody Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street was chosen as Best Musical or Comedy. Its star, Johnny Depp, won for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy for the title role, playing a vengeful barber who slits the throats of his customers in the film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s stage musical.

Atonement, which led Globe contenders with seven nominations, stars Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. The period drama traces the dire consequences following a jealous teen’s false criminal accusation against her sister’s new lover.

Britain’s Daniel-Day Lewis was named Best Dramatic Actor for the historical epic There Will Be Blood, in which he plays a baron of California’s oil boom in the early 20th century, whose commercial interests put him at odds with a young preacher.

Another British film legend Julie Christie was named Best Dramatic Actress for the gloomy drama Away From Her, starring as a woman succumbing to Alzheimer’s who forms a new attachment to a fellow patient that causes heartache for her steadfast husband.

Australian Cate Blanchett won the first award of the night, taking the Best Supporting Actress Globe for the Bob Dylan tale I’m Not There. And like Blanchett, who took the honour for the gender-bending role as one of six actors playing incarnations of Dylan, no other winners were there, either.

Picket lines

Actors and filmmakers skipped the Golden Globes because of the two-month-old strike by the Writers Guild of America, which had planned pickets outside the show if organisers had tried to do their usual televised ceremony. Globe planners and the NBC television network cancelled the three-hour star-studded bash in favour of an hour-long news conference at which clips of film and TV nominees were shown and reporters from entertainment news shows announced winners. France’s Marion Cotillard won for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for her personification of singer Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose.