Christopher Guest film takes a jab at Oscars

TORONTO - Surrounded by the cast of his latest film comedy "For Your Consideration," Christopher Guest barely smiles. Comedy after all is serious business.

He stares at a room full of reporters and fans at the Toronto film festival and seriously deadpans his answers.

"Any debate or discussion on who gets to be the lead character?" asks one reporter. Guest says "Um, we pick out of a hat."

"Loved your hair" in the movie, says another. Guest grimaces.

Guest, the director and co-writer of "Waiting for Guffman," "A Mighty Wind" and "Best in Show," is also known for his role as the tortured rocker, Nigel Tufnel, in the 1984 hit "This is Spinal Tap."

In "For Your Consideration," he has departed from his usual faux documentary style in favor of a narrative format.

The film, which he co-wrote with Canadian comedian Eugene Levy, takes jabs at the movie industry and the hysteria that surrounds the Oscars. It focuses on Marilyn Hack, an actress played by Catherine O'Hara, who is struggling for recognition.

Hack gets the part of a dying mother in an indie melodrama, "Home for Purim." Her career appears to take a turn when she hears rumors that she may land an Oscar nomination. Soon Oscar fever is rampant. Her two co-stars also get pegged as Oscar hopefuls and hilarity ensues in the run-up to nomination day.

This is the fourth film on which Guest and Levy have collaborated and they have cast many of the same actors used in previous films. Parker Posey, Harry Shearer, Fred Willard and Jennifer Coolidge are back, but there are some new faces, including Sandra Oh and Ricky Gervais.

Hard work, some laughs

Though this film is more of a narrative, the lines were improvised as they have been in Levy and Guest's previous movies. They write the back stories and scenes but not the lines.

"Eugene and I do this work before we shoot, it's difficult, we have some laughs, but you need to be very disciplined, you have to do the work and the set, I hope people are having fun, but it's not really a party atmosphere," Guest said.

For the actors, it works.

"You get to express this character you have developed with your own words, with what you believe the character would say and how they would say it, and coming from all the places you have been," O'Hara said.

Harry Shearer, whose role is the actor playing Hack's husband in the indie, agreed: "Sometimes people think we are just farting around and it's sort of 1 o'clock in the morning at an improv club. But it's hard work in the sense that we are all there for the single purpose of telling the story."

And for actors playing actors in "For Your Consideration," parallels abound. Several publications floated Levy's name for best supporting actor for his role in "A Mighty Wind" in 2003.

"You see your name, and you are thinking 'Am I going to win? It's not important, it doesn't matter, why am I even thinking about it? I can't even believe that we were nominated.'... This is what happens, you really can't get it out of your head," Levy said.

- REUTERS