GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics’ Updated 10 Best Movies About the Academy Awards (Exclusive)
Ahead of Sunday’s night’s 96th Academy Awards on ABC, how about ratcheting up the excitement by catching some big-screen flicks that somehow involve Hollywood’s most coveted statuette? AwardsWatch knows that certain cinema experts in GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics enjoy keeping tabs on movies “costarring” Oscar, and they’ve provided us with their most recent update on the glittery and glamorous, if quite specific, genre. It turns out there are a good number of films out there that might give the Academy folks pause, but we trust the GALECA team when they say the 10 titles here are the ones to really get you ready for some prime and the winner is teeth gnashing. In the mix: Wry comedies, outlandish spoofs, captivating dramas and melodramatic camp classics.
1. The Oscar (1966)
Poor sociopath Frank Fane (Stephen Boyd) wants that Best Actor trophy so bad, he’ll almost kill for it — literally — in this temples-bulging melodrama with all the Tinseltown trimmings. Where to begin? Fane’s disillusioned lover: Elke Sommer! Disillusioned pal: Tony Bennett! Agent Kappy Kapstetter (Kappy Kapstetter?!): Milton Berle? Gossip queen Hedda Hopper, famed costumer Edith Head and Nancy Sinatra play themselves, adding a bit of glam reality, but the king of Academy Awards pics is to be enjoyed for its campy dialogue and deliciously over-the-top emotions (Harlan Eillison co-wrote). The final scene — our palm-sweaty hero sits on the edge of his velvet seat, waiting for Oscar host Bob Hope to shut up and just get to what he expects will be his magical moment — is stunning. Fun fact: Sanctioned by the AMPAS itself, The Oscar was nominated for two statuettes itself — and lost.
2. For Your Consideration (2006)
A near-perfect poke at Hollywood puffery, written by (and featuring) satire gods Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy (Waiting for Guffman). Catherine O’Hara plays the appropriately named Marilyn Hack, the second-rate star of a decidedly random flick — Home for Purim, a highly emoted drama about a Jewish family in the 1940s South— that generates Oscar buzz. Watching the vain actress and her costars (played, sublimely, by the likes of Parker Posey, Harry Shearer and John Michael Higgins) act humble while jockeying for various nominations is painfully funny. As are Hack’s suddenly giant, collagenated lips. Fun fact: Parker’s ingenue character gets lots of praise for her bold performance in Purim as a lesbian who comes out to her dying mom pre-kreplach.
Note: Somewhere in between Consideration’s hilarious takedown of Academy Awards races and The Oscar’s sudsy draaaaama is 2021’s sadly unsung Official Competition, a sly Spanish seriocomedy with Antonio Banderas and Oscar Martinez great as two very different actors playing brothers in a heady film they both think is bound to land them laurels. At one point, they each recite an imaginary Oscar speech!
3. A Star is Born (1954)
Yes, Janet Gaynor and Frederic March were touching in the 1937 version, which was, yes, based on the early talkie What Price Hollywood? (1932). But no one beats Judy Garland as sweet, loving Vicki Lester, the actress who rises from dork (real name: Esther Blodgett) to elegant, humble name-above-title. And no one trumps James Mason as her self-pitying husband Norman Maine (James Mason), a suicidal alcoholic who sees his own acting career sink like a Klieg light. When Esther, er Vicki, glides to the stage for her Best Actress trophy, and a blitzed Norman ruins the moment for all to see, it’s sad indeed. And don’t get us started about that final tearjerking scene. Fun fact: Esther’s Oscar debacle was included on several of the movie’s posters. Note: Both the 1976 version with La Streisand and Kris Kristofferson and 2018 with La Gaga and Bradley Cooper are set in the (tackier) pop music world.
4. California Suite (1978)
In Neil Simon’s ’70s-chic comedy about various histrionic guests at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Maggie Smith steals the limelight as Diana, a British actress up for her first Academy Award. Her jitters are exacerbated by worries that her closeted husband and best friend (Michael Caine) is about to leave her. Fun fact: the cast and crew were granted access to the actual Oscars, so when Diana and her man walk the red carpet at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, that’s the real deal. Oh, and Smith won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role. Sweet!
5. Tropic Thunder (2008)
The premise is thunderously funny: four pampered stars of a Vietnam War flick (played by Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., Brandon T. Jackson and Jack Black) are thrown into the jungle for a big scene, guerilla-style, and think the real-life, deadly drug gang they encounter are just acting! Stiller, as Tugg Speedman, a faded action star a la Bruce Willis, chews up the scenery, almost literally, in this clever skewering of showbiz entitlement and grandiosity. Yet there’s wish fulfillment too: naturally, the men’s daring exploits are captured on film, leading to a monster hit and Tugg’s first Oscar! Un-fun fact: Tugg’s costar Kirk (Downey Jr.), an insufferable, Academy Award-laden method actor, dies his skin to play an African-American for his part, Tropic‘s dicey jab at tokenism that many moviegoers found painful instead of painfully funny. Downey Jr., nonetheless, was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his spin as a white guy daring to play a black guy in a weird bid to win . . . an Oscar. What a meta-go-round!
6. In & Out (1997)
It could happen this Sunday night! Thrilled over his Oscar win for playing a gay soldier, hipster movie star Cameron Drake (Matt Dillon) gives thanks to his gay acting coach from his high school days. Trouble is, said teacher Howard Brackett (Kevin Kline) is in the closet with an unwitting fiance (Joan Cusack)! Groundbreaking for its long man-on-man kissing scene (Howard sparks the interest of a showbiz reporter played by Tom Selleck), Out actually rings funnier and braver nearly 20 years after its debut. And not just because homophobia deserves tweaking more than ever — the showbiz humor shines too. Actor Cameron’s fellow noms, revealed by presenter Glenn Close with perfectly wan smarm, include “Paul Newman for Coot“: Fun fact: screenwriter Paul Rudnick’s inspiration for Out came from an actual Oscar moment. In 1994, when Tom Hanks accepted his Best Actor award for his role as a man suffering AIDS in Philadelphia, he thanked his own high school drama coach and flagged him as gay — only in this case with the teacher’s approval.
7. Mommie Dearest (1981)
Oh, dear: In this dishy biopic, tense Faye Dunaway plays tense movie star Joan Crawford, who in one glorious scene accepts her Oscar for Mildred Pierce (1945) while sick at home in bed, with reporters and radio mics by her hammy, manipulative, faux-humble side. The scene wasn’t a case of “creative license”—Crawford milked the moment pretty much as depicted. And as Dunaway chews up the scenery here, it’s impossible to not think of her own contribution to the Academy’s list of cringe-tastic moments. Altogether now: “La La Land!”
8. The Star (1952)
Crawford’s silver-screen rival, Bette Davis is admirably self-aware in this cautionary showbiz tale as Margaret, an aging movie queen desperate to regain her fame (and, by proxy, youth). The woman is so frustrated she can’t land great parts, she gets trashed on booze, grabs the Oscar she won in her salad days, and takes her tiny friend on a wild joyride in her car. Maggie got a D.U.I., while Davis herself landed an Oscar nomination.
9. The Bodyguard (1992)
If Oscar were truly anthropomorphous, he’d be running for cover in the final scene of this chunk of cheese starring Whitney Houston in her singing and acting prime. Thanks to smitten bodyguard Frank (Kevin Costner), superstar Rachel Marron (Houston) is able to evade a psycho stalker through most of this romantic thriller. Somehow, the would-be assassin breaks into the Academy Awards pre-show, hides a gun in a TV camera, and starts shooting at Rachel just as she’s about to accept her Oscar for Best Actress, live! Hmmm, wonder if the show enjoyed a ratings bump the following year.
10. Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994)
Turns out 2017’s infamous Oscars show—the one with the La La Land-wrongly-named-best-pic debacle—coulda been worse. In the last of the pratfall-filled The Naked Gun movies, accident-prone Los Angeles lawman Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) tries to stop some mobsters from blowing up the Academy Awards (the mol’s played by Anna Nicole Smith). One funny bit: Florence Henderson is in the running for one of the gold statuettes! And, in the comedy’s climax, Frank interrupts presenter Raquel Welch (as her glam, game self) during the live telecast in the slapstickiest of ways. How this flick ever made it past AMPAS’s team of ultra-protective brand hawks is a mystery.
Honorable mention
What’s Cookin’ Doc? (1944)
“Who, who, will win the Oscar?” intones the narrator in this fun, respectful spoof of awards races starring . . . Bugs Bunny! Filmdom’s most animated rabbit one-ups the aforementioned Frank Fane of The Oscar as he begs for the prize even after losing to — spoiler alert — James Cagney. This snarky cartoon short is mixed with clips of L.A.’s then-hopping nightlife, with stops at the Trocadero, Hollywood Bowl, Coconut Grove and Chinese Theater. Don’t miss the epilogue, in which Bugs winds up winning a special something in an moment that’s genuinely, surprisingly gay. Now that’s a fun fact!
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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