For Your Consideration

By now, sensible seasoned cinema goers will have stopped expecting the always tolerable antics of the Christopher Guest players to replicate the brilliance of This Is Spinal Tap. But For Your Consideration, a predictably broad satire about Oscar fever, is probably the gang’s best offering since Waiting For Guffman. Oddly, the film is not a mockumentary though you’d be hard pressed to spot as much. Faux entertainment reports and an on set ‘making of’ doc allow the characters to function in the same freewheeling, improvised style as Best In Show or A Mighty Wind. Catherine O’Hara is the veteran actress whose latest role as the dying matriarch in a Jewish family drama is attracting an ‘Oscar buzz’. Like all movies within movies – see also the dreadful American Sweethearts – For Your Consideration’s impression of a potential Academy Award winner is well wide of the mark, a stilted weepie about an estranged lesbian daughter (Posey). No matter. Old reliables Jennifer Coolidge and Bob Balaban provide plenty of merriment and O’Hara’s quietly tragic diva delivers a deft emotional knockout at the film’s denouement. How ironic that she failed to get an Oscar nomination for her sterling efforts.