With the Academy Awards looming, and after three months on the picket lines, the striking writers are to meet on Saturday to get briefed by union leaders on the latest offer from the heads of Hollywood studios, and it's expected they will urge those leaders to adopt the new contract so they can get back to work.

That's even as leaders of the Writers Guild of America press members to continue walking the picket lines and to disregard reports that a deal is all but done.

Terms of the latest offer have not been revealed, but it appears to give the writers much of what they have been asking for in terms of payment for work that appears on the internet, either originally or as reruns.

New media rights had been the sticking point from well before the writers walked off on Nov. 5, and they've remained at the forefront of their on-and-off negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the negotiating arm of the studios.

The breakthrough came when the AMPTP recently reached an agreement with the Directors Guild of America that's considerably more generous in new media payouts than what it offered the writers.

Typically, the first of three unions to reach a deal with the studios--the WGA, the DGA or the actors’ guild--creates the template for agreements with the other two.

The agreement with the DGA opened the way for the WGA and the AMPTP to resume talks on an informal basis, and this time around there appeared to be a real desire on both sides to finally reach a deal. Word out of the talks has it that the AMPTP was modifying the new media terms in the DGA deal to meet the specific concerns of the writers.

Presumably, writers could be off the picket lines as early as next week if WGA leaders vote to approve the new contract, which covers upwards of 10,000 writers.

That would allow the Academy Awards to air as planned on Feb. 24.

It will also mean fully staffed writing crews on the late-night shows, which were the first to feel the effects of the strike, as well as the daytime soaps. Here the timing could not be better. For months they’d gotten by on backlog of scripts—soaps typically are written months ahead—but those scripts were fast running out, or had run out, and more and more the shows were turning to non-WGA writers who were not familiar with the shows often complex plotlines and character quirks.

Ratings were already suffering this season, the result of the natural attrition of network daytime audiences, and the fear was that the soaps were about to take far worse tumbles as longtime viewers came to notice the declining quality of the scripts.

As for primetime, fresh episodes likely won’t start airing until at least April. That’s how long it would take to get scripts written and episodes shot if the strike were to end next week.

Sitcoms would come back sooner than dramas, since they don’t require shooting on location.