Since it’s awards season, I’m gonna hand one out.

And the winner of the most improved celebrity award of 2006 is — drum roll, please — Courtney Love!

And yes, I know it's only January. But you gotta act fast handing out encouraging "improved" kudos in this town.

Love was a sight for sore eyes at HBO’s hotter-than-hot, star-packed pre-Golden Globes party at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. Looking seriously slimmer, the former “Hole” singer appeared to have jettisoned about 40-plus pounds of blubber, thanks to her court-ordered return to rehab.

Jeepers, where’d they send her? Canyon Ranch?

Love was also quieter at the HBO party, where she was introduced out on the patio by superpublicist Jason Weinberg to a shorn Natalie Portman. Hard to imagine those two having much in common, but hey, you never know.

This was certainly a marked improvement in manners since her last public appearance at Pamela Anderson’s Comedy Central Roast last summer, when Love got onstage and roared that she was clean and sober before flashing her flabby belly (and almost her breasts) to a horrified studio audience on the Sony Pictures lot.

Afterward, comedian Jimmy Kimmel remarked. “Courtney, you keep saying you’re not doing drugs. I hope that’s not true. Because if it is, then you’ve got real problems.”

Apparently, Love is cleaning up her beauty act too. She spent two hours before the party Saturday at the Biolage Get Glam/Do Good suite in the Raffles L’Ermitage hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif., getting a Biolage Cera-Repair Pro4 deep conditioning hair treatment and a fluffy blowout.

Then she sat still for a free makeover from Armani cosmetics’ celebrity makeup guru Tim Quinn. All reports are that she was sweet and polite. Our Courtney? Wow.

The stylists worked their magic on Love and she looked absolutely gorgeous when she left, ready to hit the Globe party scene with friend Kimberly Stewart. Love was also in good company at L’Ermitage. She, like Teri Hatcher, Maggie Grace and Elisha Cuthbert all left with orange leather totes jammed with customized Biolage and Armani goodies worth more than $600.

Let's just hope Love doesn’t get off the road-to-recovery when she reads her mother Linda Carroll's just published tell-all memoir. “Her Mother’s Daughter: A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love,” with salacious snippets about the “magic pills” Courtney’s dad made her swallow, how a preteen Courtney got drunk on homemade apple wine at a family Christmas party, set fires, stole porn mags from bookstores and ended up as a stripper living on the streets before marrying, then becoming, a tortured self-destructive punk star.

Hey, other than dad’s magic pills and the fires, sounds like a perfectly normal celebrity childhood to me.

Photo (left): Courtney Love gets a Globes party face at the L'Ermitage Get Glam/Do Good suite.
(J Sciulli / WireImage)

Photo (right): Love lived large and let loose last year at the Pamela Anderson Comedy Central Roast.
(Chris Walter / WireImage)