For Your Consideration

Guest, co-writer Levy and their habitual repertory players ditch the mockumentary template they’ve been using since Waiting for Guffman but otherwise stick to the formulas that work for them in this gentle and sufficiently amusing comedy about Hollywood small fry who momentarily become the objects of Oscar buzz.

The wonderful and underutilized O’Hara plays a veteran character actress playing a bedridden yiddishe mama in an unlikely Southern family melodrama called Home for Purim. A baseless rumor has it that the role will garner her an Oscar nomination. Tensions mount among cast members as the Hollywood hype machine goes into overdrive.

Closer to a series of sketches than a bona fide movie, Consideration falls short of Best in Show for charm and cohesion, but that still leaves plenty of room for it to be fun. Willard and the delightful Lynch stand out amid a uniformly strong cast as the brain-dead hosts of an Access Hollywood–style irritainment show. Higgins is also fine as a screw-loose publicist who can’t go 30 seconds without dropping a reference to his alleged Native American heritage (“one-eighth Mighty Choctaw”) into the conversation. (Opens Fri; see www.timeout.com/chicago/nowplaying for showtimes.)—Cliff Doerksen