Hollywood’s writers and the major studios agreed Friday to resume their negotiations in hopes of reaching an agreement that would end the 11-week-old strike, according to several people close to the matter.

Writers Guild of America leaders plan to meet Tuesday with News Corp. President Peter Chernin and possibly other studio chiefs, reviving talks that fell apart in early December.

Representatives of the Writers Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios, declined to comment on the meeting.

But in an interview Friday, WGA West President Patric M. Verrone acknowledged that his union was ready to re-engage.

“Everyone wants us to get back into negotiations, and that’s what we intend to do,” Verrone said.

Verrone declined to give his assessment of the DGA deal, saying guild officials were studying its contents. The guild’s negotiating committee will meet Saturday to discuss the directors’ contract and make recommendations to Verrone and Executive Director David Young on how to proceed in their upcoming negotiations.

Though the directors’ deal falls short of what the writers were seeking, it generally received positive reviews from several negotiating committee members and top writers.

“I’m really impressed how mindful the DGA was that the deal had to be good enough to put the whole town back to work,” said writer-director Scott Frank (“Minority Report,” “The Interpreter”), a member of the Writers Guild board. “They were under enormous pressure, and they seemed to have delivered.”

Meanwhile, as the Hollywood writers’ strike threatens to disrupt the 50th annual Grammy telecast, some in the music industry are befuddled, frustrated and even resentful.

The Writers Guild of America, which went on strike two months ago, has said it was unlikely to grant the Recording Academy a waiver to allow writers to work on the Feb. 10 show, the music industry’s most important event, set to be broadcast live on CBS from Los Angeles.

The guild refused to grant the waiver for the Golden Globes and threatened picketing, and the Screen Actors Guild encouraged its stars to stay away as well. As a result, the typically lavish three-hour televised awards extravaganza was reduced to a one-hour, celebrity-free newscast on Jan. 13.

While Recording Academy President Neil Portnow has insisted that a full-scale Grammys will continue no matter what – and Beyonce and the Foo Fighters announced they still plan to perform at the event – some musicians may sit out the broadcast in solidarity with writers, especially top-level musical superstars who also are actors, such as nominees Justin Timberlake and Alicia Keys.

Best new artist nominee Feist, who is up for four Grammys, told the AP last week she planned to go to the event, but hat may change if the WGA pickets. She admitted she doesn’t really understand the issues involved in the writers strike, and because of that, she said, she turned down an invitation to appear last week on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report.”

“I just balked,” she said. “I couldn’t see myself crossing the picket line. I don’t know enough about the cause to speak about it, for or against. You cross the picket line, you have to speak about it.”