Who Will Receive this Year's Cecil B. DeMille Award?

This year "Pre-Awards" season won't begin for me with Entertainment Weekly's Holiday Movie Preview issue which presumably will come out on Thursday (it's generally the first issue of November— but oddly wasn't this year).  So the flip-flop will have Pre-Awards start with the announcement of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's Golden Globe Award for lifetime achievement, the Cecil B. DeMille Award. The timing of the announcement has changed a lot recently— it was traditionally on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving week, and last year, it was the Thursday of the second week of November.  This year it will be tomorrow, Tuesday, November 9th.

The Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Golden Globe was first given in 1952, to namesake Cecil B. DeMille himself. Producer/Director DeMille was one of the most successful filmmakers of Hollywood's Golden Age and in 1952 he made the film that would win Oscar's Best Picture, The Greatest Show on Earth. Who won the second DeMille award? Walt Disney.

In the early years of the award, the recipient was generally a producer/studio head, but starting with Maurice Chevalier (1959's recipient) performers have worked their way up, to the point that the award has been given exclusively to them since 1978 (with a few "hyphenates" among them, such as Clint Eastwood), until Steven Spielberg's 2008 win.

So, who do you think will be given this year's Cecil B. DeMille Award? The most likely candidate of the last several years has certainly been Meryl Streep. Streep has received the most career nominations (at 25). Plus she's had a string of high profile hits as of late critically and commercially, too.

Here is a link to the Cecil B. DeMille Award on the HFPA's website.

And here is a handy one-page list on Wikipedia.

What is your guess for this year's DeMille?

Notables who have yet to receive the honor include: Woody Allen, Julie Andrews, Kenneth Branagh, Michael Caine, Glenn Close, Tom Cruise, Daniel Day-Lewis, Robert DeNiro, Gerard Depardieu, Robert Duvall, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Jodie Foster, Morgan Freeman, Tom Hanks, George Lucas, Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole, Michelle Pfeiffer, Julia Roberts, Sylvester Stallone, Meryl Streep, John Travolta, and Denzel Washington.

... My perennial guess is HFPA favorite (12 noms, 3 wins) Michael Caine, but the wind has blown toward non-actors.   When Spielberg won in 2008/09, my pick for '09/10 became Francis Ford Coppola, however the HFPA went with Martin Scorsese. With Coppola as one of this year's Honorary Oscar recipients, it's unlikely that he'll get it due to the double-up factor... Therefore, I'm going to go with Woody Allen (if they can convince him to accept) as my prediction for this year.