• Period Pieces and (Very Loosely) Based on a True Story works.
• Tragedies, the sadder the better. This can include:
  • Family conflicts — Dysfunctional Families, Domestic Abuse, adultery, divorce, or the death of a family member.
  • Personal struggles, like mental illness, a terminal disease, or Descent into Addiction.
  • Marginalization and discrimination for traits like race, class, gender, or sexuality.
  • Political persecution and repression, told from the perspective of the regime's victims.
  • Someone vulnerable and innocent being victimized, like a child (Abusive Parents, Littlest Cancer Patient, Death of a Child) or animal (Bad People Abuse Animals, Lost Pet Grievance).
• The natural intersection of period pieces and tragedies—historical wars, disasters, and atrocities like antebellum slavery or The Holocaust.
• Conversely, David Versus Goliath and Rags to Riches stories about protagonists overcoming tremendous adversity:
  • Inspirationally Disadvantaged protagonists whose physical or mental disabilities make them Closer to Earth or don't stop them from achieving their dreams.
  • Crusading Lawyers who defend someone falsely accused or bring a class-action lawsuit against a Corrupt Corporate Executive.
  • A Forbidden Friendship or romance between members of accepted and discriminated groups.
  • Cool Teacher protagonists who connect with struggling youths and inspire them to succeed. The students may also be disabled or minorities (at risk of accusations of White Man's Burden overtones).
  • Sports Stories about an underdog athlete or Ragtag Bunch of Misfits defeating a far more renowned rival to win the Big Game.
  • A genius and/or trailblazer whose brilliance is hampered by personal demons and/or a lack of public acceptance (bonus points if it's also a biopic and Period Piece).
• Works about the entertainment industry, because award panels always love a story about how their preferred artform is full of geniuses:
  • Films about filmmaking, especially if it's about a famous filmmaker or the story of Making the Masterpiece.
  • Books about writers, journalists (especially covering historically or politically significant stories), and the publishing industry.
  • Biopics about the lives of famous actors, directors, authors, and musicians.
• Adaptations of critically acclaimed works from other media formats, such as novels or Broadway plays. (No comedies, though.) invoked

• Melodramatic acting, especially in an emotional moment like a death scene or Blowout Fight between characters.
• Actors Playing Against Type and showcasing their range, especially if they're a comedic actor trying their hand at drama. (The inverse is never quite as well-received.)
• Actors undergoing massive physical or psychological changes for a role, such as grueling Method Acting or Dyeing for Your Art.

(This tends to be the only area where sci-fi and fantasy works break Out of the Ghetto and perform well at awards shows.)

• Extensive use of Practical Effects in place of CGI.
• Massive and elaborate setpieces, especially if it involves painstakingly recreating a famous or historical locale in a Period Piece.
• Costume Porn, with (once again) heavy bias towards detailed recreations of elaborate historical outfits like 18th or 19th century European courtly styles.
• Novel and impressive cinematography, such as The Oner or an Epic Tracking Shot.
• Deliberately Monochrome color palettes (especially with parodies of specific films like Schindler's List or The Artist).

• In Blazing Saddles, villain Hedley Lamarr announces to his gang of thugs near the climax, "You will only be risking your lives, while I will almost certainly be risking an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor."
• Bowfinger: Black action star Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy), as he complains to his manager about how "White boys win all the Oscars, it’s a fact!", claims that he wasn’t nominated "'Cause I haven't played any of them slave roles, where I get my ass whipped. That's how you get the nominations!" He then notes, "A white boy plays an idiot, they get the Oscar", and tells his manager, "Find me a script as a retarded slave, then I'll get the Oscar!"
• In Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, after parodying one of the dramatic scenes from Boyz n the Hood, the main character tells his girlfriend that he's trying to win the Best Black Actor at the Soul Train awards.
• For Your Consideration: The film-within-a-film Pride of Plymouth Rock is a historical epic about the first Thanksgiving; the film Home for Purim gets retitled Home for Thanksgiving to try and compete against it for Oscar buzz.
• Get Shorty: Chili mentions that Martin Weir's best performance was as a "crippled gay guy who climbed Mt. Whitney."
• The first fifteen minutes of In & Out are rife with references to this trope. Matt Dillon’s character wins an Oscar for To Serve and Protect, a Vietnam War drama about a war hero who's dishonorably discharged for his homosexuality, in a film that appears to be equal parts A Few Good Men, Philadelphia, and Forrest Gump. The actors he beat: "Paul Newman for Coot, Clint Eastwood for Codger, Michael Douglas for Primary Urges, and Steven Seagal for Snowball in Hell."
• The Mask (1994) has a shootout sequence where the Mask, after dodging a ridiculous number of bullets, turns into a cowboy and allows himself to be shot — so that he can give several Final Speeches (all Shout Outs to award-winning movies) and die in another character’s arms. Then the audience cheers, and he gets up and tearfully accepts an award. Even the mobsters shooting him check their hair and straighten their suits as if they were on TV.
• Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult includes a scene at the Oscar ceremony, where all the films were ridiculously pretentious, like "the story of one woman's triumph over the death of her cat, set against the background of the Hindenburg disaster," and "the story of one woman's triumph over a yeast infection, set against the background of the tragic Buffalo Bills season of 1971."
• Om Shanti Om: Parodied when Om has to play a blind, deaf, and mute quadruple amputee. Sure, critics will love it, but his fans will be bored.
• The Road to ... series:
  • At the end of Road to Morocco, Bob Hope's character has accidentally blown up the ship, leaving the main cast stranded on a raft. Hope starts Chewing the Scenery, acting as if they've been stranded there for weeks. Then the camera pans up to reveal the New York City skyline. Bing Crosby’s character tells him to calm down, to which Hope bitterly remarks that they’ve ruined his chance for an Academy Award.
  • In Road to Bali, Crosby finds the Oscar Humphrey Bogart won for The African Queen. Hope points out that Crosby already has an Oscar, snatches the trophy from him, and begins making an acceptance speech. (While Hope was never nominated for a competitive Oscar, he did win four Honorary Oscars and hosted the show a recorded fourteen times.)
• State and Main is a comedy about the Troubled Production of The Old Mill, a dramatic period piece about a romantic affair in 19th-century rural New England.
• Tropic Thunder:
  • The film-within-a-film of the same name is clearly meant to be an Oscar Bait film: it's a based-on-a-true-story war epic about a soldier who survives impossible odds and becomes tragically maimed, featuring plenty of insane practical effects, elaborate setpieces, and heart-wrenching death scenes.
  • Kirk Lazarus is an over-the-top Method Actor (he says he doesn't break character until he's finished recording the DVD commentary) who's no stranger to making Oscar Bait movies, having won five times:^note Ironically, Robert Downey Jr. was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for playing Kirk Lazarus at that year's Oscars
    • One fake trailer at the beginning of the movie shows Lazarus and Tobey Maguire starring in a film called Satan's Alley, about two medieval Irish monks in an illegal relationship in an isolated monastery. In a Brick Joke at the end of the film, Tobey is shown to have been nominated at the Oscars.
    • He once starred in a biopic about Neil Armstrong titled Moonshot. He got so into character that he came to believe he really was Neil Armstrong and went crazy; he said he was found "in an alley in Burbank trying to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere in an old refrigerator box."
    • For another film, Land of Silk and Money, he got into character by learning Mandarin Chinese and spending eight months working in a textile sweatshop.
    • According to supplemental material, one of his five Oscars is for Best Actress, having apparently tackled a Cross-Cast Role.
    • For Tropic Thunder, Lazarus undergoes a controversial skin-darkening surgery so he can play the black character Sgt. Lincoln Osiris.
  • Action star Tugg Speedman reflects on the failure of his Oscar Bait film Simple Jack, in which he plays an Inspirationally Disadvantaged farmhand. It was a total Box-Office Bomb and called one of the worst films of all time. Lazarus explains to him that it's because he made the mistake of going "full retard":
    Speedman: What do you mean?
    Lazarus: Check it out. Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man: look retarded, act retarded, not retarded. Counted toothpicks, cheated cards. Autistic, sho'. Not retarded. You know Tom Hanks, Forrest Gump. Slow, yes, retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and won a ping pong competition. That ain't retarded. [And he was a goddamn war hero. You know any retarded war heroes?] ^note In the theatrical cut of the film, the line in brackets is instead "Peter Sellers, Being There: infantile, yes, retarded, no."; the line was changed in later cuts on the grounds that Sellers didn't win an Oscar for Being There. You went full retard, man. Never go full retard. You don't buy that? Ask Sean Penn, 2001, i am sam. Remember? Went full retard, went home empty-handed.
  • At the end of the film, the Oscar for Best Actor is presented. The nominees are Speedman in Tropic Blunder, Maguire in Satan's Alley, Tom Hanks winning a race in a wheelchair, a blind Sean Penn learning Braille, and a nondescript Jon Voight role.
• Walk Hard is a parody of Oscar-winning musician biopics like Walk the Line and Ray, and riffs on plenty of story beats from their stories. Dewey Cox deals with a tragic family death (brother cut in half), disapproving parents ("The wrong kid died!"), childhood disability (he goes smell-blind), meteoric rise to stardom, extramarital affair, drug addiction and rehabilitation, and triumphant conclusion where he gets his personal life sorted out and gives the final best concert of his life before dropping dead on stage minutes later.
• In Wayne's World, Wayne gives a dramatic, teary-eyed^note He didn't actually cry, he just splashed water in his face speech while the words "Oscar Clip" are emblazoned over the shot. He even finishes it off by claiming to be illiterate, which he then admits isn't true after the "Oscar Clip" subtitle goes away.
• Weird: The Al Yankovic Story: Similar to Walk Hard, the story adds a bunch of fictional drama into Al's life to line up with other acclaimed biopics, including a Fantasy-Forbidding Father, his mother's Weight Woe, a Descent into Addiction, an affair with Madonna, and Al's tragic assassination at the Grammy Awards. It even has an Award-Bait Song in the end credits, "Now You Know", with lyrics like "This song is technically eligible for Oscar consideration!"^note It actually wasn't, since the film never got a theatrical release.

• Sin du Jour: In Pride's Spell, the movie whose premiere party Sin du Jour is catering is a parody of this trope. Apparently, it's about a mentally challenged gay Jew living during the Holocaust.
  Cindy: So their asses just want all the Oscars.
  Jett: Oh, it already has intense Oscar buzz!
• Yellowface (2023): The Last Front is described by June as an awards-bait book, with its genre-spanning subplots, non-linear narrative (compared to Dunkirk), historical setting, and spotlighting of an underrepresented demographic. It garners both critical and audience acclaim after it comes out, though June brushes off it being snubbed invoked by the biggest literary awards as a sign that it's simply too popular.

• 30 Rock: Tracy starred in the Oscar-winning film Hard to Watch, an incredibly depressing film (based on an even sadder book called Stone Cold Bummer) that parodies films like Precious. He plays a black former football star who failed to fulfill his dreams of making it out of the ghetto and getting an education.
• The Afterparty: Culp says that one of Germain's previous cases is being turned into a limited series with an All-Star Cast as a blatant awards play.
• In season 4 of Arrested Development, Rebel Alley (Isla Fisher) discusses the possibility of playing Michael’s deceased wife in a movie. After learning that said wife died of a terminal illness, Rebel says that all she needs now is to have her be mentally-challenged as well, and she'll be guaranteed an Oscar for her performance.
• Castle has a suspect who's an actor and says he’s playing Matt Damon’s "half-wit father" because "it’s got nominations written all over it."
• The Chaser's War On Everything: The sketch "Oscar Bait" spoofs many of the common elements of this trope. It’s a fake trailer for a film about a gay disabled Jewish artist who’s thrown in a concentration camp during The Holocaust, trying to tick as many Oscar boxes at once. The lead actor even apparently killed himself after the film to try and win even more awards (posthumously).
• Derry Girls: In the first episode of the third season, the girls and James try to make a short film about The Troubles after hearing that, supposedly, a few kids from Germany made a short film about the Berlin Wall and won an Oscar.
  Michelle: Aye, but they probably had, you know, talent.
• Dick & Dom in da Bungalow: One of the Game Shows the kids take part in is "The Crying Game", where the winner is the first person to start crying. The Expository Theme Tune mockingly adds that the winner will also earn an Oscar nomination.
• Documentary Now!: "Mr. Runner Up: My Life as an Oscar Bridesmaid" is about producer Jerry Wallach's decades-long career producing blatant Oscar bait films:
  • His first big film is a Sword and Sandal Biblical epic called Friend of the Son of Man, adapted from a heretical gospel written by Jesus's estranged childhood friend Lewis.
  • He adapts a Law Procedural about a Holocaust war criminal's trial called She Cried for Justice, but his excessive Executive Meddling leads to it becoming a romantic comedy called Blondes, Blondes, Blondes and a Millionaire.
  • He's shown making a series of films that rip off contemporary films, invoked including Koreatown, Back from Vietnam and Upset, Revenge Guy, Kenny, Robot Bachelor, Oliver Stone's Spiro Agnew, and White Love in Rhodesia.
  • Fisting is his attempt at creating a gritty, unscripted, sexually risqué art house film starring unknown actors and filmed guerrilla-style on the streets of New York, a la Midnight Cowboy. It gets completely overshadowed at the box office because it came out the same day as Star Wars.
  • Jerry makes an underdog sports film in the vein of A League of Their Own called The Shitbox Sluggers starring Meat Loaf as the coach.
  • In the 1990s, he makes a biopic film on Wyatt Earp called Mr. Old West, which competed with the Dueling Works invoked Wyatt Earp and Tombstone for that year's Oscars... all of whom weren't nominated at all and were overshadowed by Forrest Gump.
  • Jerry even founds a charity that gives film cameras to inner-city gangbangers and heavily publicizes his efforts so he can get a humanitarian Oscar. The Academy creates the Jerry Wallach Humanitarian Award... which is won by his friend Enzo Entolini.
  • He finally gets what he wants at the end when it's revealed a bullshit idea he had off-the-cuff becomes the film Crash.
• The Drew Carey Show parodies Emmy Bait with its fifth-season finale “A Very Special Drew”. It includes a homeless woman giving birth, Kate dying of a terminal disease on her wedding day, Drew battling his heretofore-unmentioned lifelong illiteracy, Mimi battling her also heretofore-unmentioned obsessive-compulsive disorder, Lewis snapping at people and reflecting on why out loud to the audience, Oswald taking up theft to be closer to his imprisoned father, Drew and Lewis volunteering to get shot so that they’d have a good death scene, Mr. Wick developing an eating disorder, and a Littlest Cancer Patient, who gets the Emmy.
• In Extras, Kate Winslet, Adam Westing as herself, appears in a Holocaust movie and openly states she's only doing it because Holocaust movies are a good way to win an Oscar. Then in 2008, Winslet did it in real life with The Reader. This did not go unnoticed.
• The Fast Show spoofs the trope with the film Cute Disabled Man, which wins an award for “Best Portrayal of a Disabled Person by a Fit and Healthy Young Actor Who Wants to Win an Oscar”.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has “The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award”. It’s nominally about the gang trying to win a Best Bar award, but is actually a Leaning on the Fourth Wall commentary on the fact that the show has failed to garner any recognition from the Emmys by having the bars stand in for shows. The gang is going up against a bar straight out of Cheers (with a Token Minority manager for good measure) where the owners make generic and inoffensive jokes, complete with a Laugh Track. The gang tries to model Paddy’s Pub after the winning bar, such as by making sure they don't have too many black guys present so the judges won't think it's a "black bar" and trying to create some Will They or Won't They? tension between Mac and Dee. Charlie even decides to write an Award-Bait Song for the bar to help them win. As with everything they try, they fail spectacularly.
• The Kevin Bishop Show had a spoof trailer for a BAFTA Bait TV drama, consisting solely of the phrase “gritty BAFTA” said with a pained, serious expression.
• A The Kids in the Hall sketch shows the best actor nomination at an Oscar show. Three of the actors played Inspirationally Disadvantaged (ranging from being deaf to having a spike in their head); their characters give the exact same Rousing Speech with appropriate music. The fourth clip is of a guy playing Hamlet. They award the Oscar to "everyone but the Hamlet guy!"
• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver has the Warren G. Harding biopic starring a wax sculpture thereof and Oscar-nominated actors.
• Late Night with Seth Meyers had a fake trailer called Oscar Bait, where the protagonist (played by Meyers) struggles with a failing relationship, latent homosexuality, racial bigotry, a terminal disease, and constant crying, with plenty of artsy angles and long-take shots.
• Married... with Children has at least one episode that ended with a heartwarming scene and the subtitle "For your Emmy considerations."
• Mock the Week:
  David Mitchell: I'd like to thank the person who cast me as a blind, autistic, Parkinson's-disease-ridden mute, for making this award almost inevitable.
• Mr. Show: One sketch is about "The Dewey Awards", which are specifically given to actors who played mentally disabled characters. One winner is a film called The Bob Lamonta Story, about a man who struggles with his own mentally challenged parents (only for Lamonta himself to show up and claim it was all Based on a Great Big Lie).
• Saturday Night Live: A cut for time sketch starring Rami Malek titled "Brutal Marriage Movie" parodies works like Marriage Story and Scenes from a Marriage (2021) that examine the breakdown of a married couple's relationship. It features actors who "fully expect Oscars", melodramatic overacting, moody music, and protagonists dramatically fighting over mundane things.
  Voiceover: Another film that shows you what a bummer it is to share your life with another person. "Brutal Marriage Movie". Featuring two actors who fully expect Oscars. Really chewing on it. I mean, really chewing on it.
• The Other Two:
  • The play 8 Gay Men With AIDS: A Poem in Many Hours is a multi-night, overly pretentious, badly-paced Tragic AIDS Story that nobody wants to criticize or walk out on for fear of offending the LGBT and HIV+ communities. It is quickly nominated for at least one Tony, to Cary's shock.
  • Cary, deciding he wants a similar level of acclaim, demands an Oscar from his team. His agent quickly gets acclaimed director Kelly Reichardt and buzzy star Harry Styles attached to a gay film that everyone is confident will keep Cary in the Oscar conversation. He realizes, however, that the industry is turning him into a bad person and decides to take a break from acting rather than do the film.
• The Soup has a trailer for a fictional film called The Oscar Movie, with a voiceover discussing almost every Oscar Bait cliché using clips from that year’s actual Oscar nominees. These include: “women distraught, crying, and/or screaming,” comedians in serious roles, Meryl Streep (mentioned at least three times), and "Johnny Depp doing something weird."
• Whose Line Is It Anyway? had a sketch where Ryan Stiles has to report the weather as if it were a scene from an Oscar-winning film. He did so by ribbing host Drew Carey and referencing “A Very Special Drew” (mentioend above).

• An Idea For A Movie by punk band The Vandals basically narrates a pitch the band has for a movie about a boy that can fly. One of the brief lines mentioned lampshades, "Is it too soon to whisper "Oscar"?"

• Dead Ringers: The cast of Time lay things out to Sean Bean that the show must be as bleak and miserable as humanly possible so that they can get "wall to wall BAFTAs". When he breaks one of the rules, keeping any monologue to under two minutes, the rest of the cast come back to beat him senseless. Funnily enough, Time did in fact go on to win two BAFTAs...
  Stephen Graham: I warned you, Monologue Boy! Think of the BAFTAs!

• There’s a monthly online contest called “Bait an Oscar”, where contestants write film pitches to be voted on as if they were Oscar contenders. Oddly enough, this is a subversion; most participants tend to be fans of this kind of movie and are genuinely trying to pitch good ideas.
• CollegeHumor made a video on this topic titled 21 Steps to Making an Oscar Movie, including: high-contrast low-saturation lighting, suspenseful piano music, period clothing, disability, drug addiction, low camera angle, suicide, and a lot of other clichés.
• “CollegeHumor” did a parody of Whiplash with Weird Al being intercut with the scene in the film where JK Simmons’ character of Terrence Fletcher is beating Miles Teller to extreme proportions. When Fletcher throws a cymbal at the head of Weird Al and asks why he he thinks he did that, Weird Al quizzically says, “Because you’re trying to win an academy award.”
• A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever by BriTANicK.com and hosted on Cracked is about a well-off protagonist raising an Inspirationally Disadvantaged guy and gaining a new perspective on life, with side plots about inspiring a Latino boy to academically succeed, defending an innocent black man in court, and helping an underdog high school basketball team win the big game. Among the cast is "Actor Desperately Trying For An Academy Award."
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series:
  • From "A Very Special, Award-Winning Episode of Zorc & Pals".
    Florence: What's wrong, Zorc? Why haven't you destroyed the world?
    Zorc: I have a terminal disease!
    Florence: You can't die! What about our adopted daughter?
    Zorc: She also has a terminal disease!
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh!: Bonds Beyond Time Abridged:
    Yugi: (holding his grandpa's bandanna) GRANDPAAAAAAA!!! (Beat) Can I have my Oscar now?

• American Dad!:
  • Greg and Terry decide to film Stan as he searches for Oliver North's gold in "Stanny Slickers 2: The Legend of Ollie's Gold":
    Terry: We are a lock for an Oscar if there isn't a documentary about penguins or genocide this year.
    Greg: Or penguin genocide.
    Both: Awwww…
  • In a James Bond spoof, Roger plays the role of Tear Jerker, a villain whose Evil Plan is to make a film that’s so tragic it will kill anyone who watches it. That film, Oscar Gold, is a Deliberately Monochrome Holocaust drama starring himself as a mentally disabled alcoholic Jewish boy whose puppy dies of cancer while he's hiding from the Nazis in an attic like Anne Frank. When the plan fails, Tearjerker tries to go even sadder: six hours of a baby chimpanzee trying to revive its dead mother.
• Animaniacs:
  • One short is an Anvilicious spoof of not just Oscar Bait, but also the animated awards the show could actually compete with. It started with saving a beached whale and went on from there. They didn't win, and everything went to Hell after that.
  • In a Thanksgiving episode, Miles Standing is out hunting turkeys, while the Warners play Native Americans raised by turkeys. While Dot waxes eloquent over their hardship, the caption "ACADEMY MEMBERS VOTE NOW!" flashes on the screen.
  • During their "Jokahontas" sketch, a Take That! against Disney movies, the song "Same Old Heroine" has this line:
    The Schloscar it will win
    With the same old heroine
    It worked once, why not again?
• Spoofed in The Boondocks episode “The Color Ruckus”, where Uncle Ruckus tells his depressing life story to Robert, Huey, and Riley, who can’t help but listen because it’s so sad.
  Huey: That's like, Academy Award-winning sad.
• Bugs Bunny has been known to occasionally shill for Oscars with overwrought "dramatic" performances:
  • In The Wabbit Who Came to Supper, Bugs pleads with Elmer Fudd to let him into his house, complaining in a very dramatic fashion about the cold. He suddenly perks up and says, "Hey, this scene oughta get me the Academy Award!" Then he finishes "dying", complete with mournful violins.
  • In What's Cookin, Doc?, he’s so enamored with his "acting" that he crashes the ceremony to demand his Best Actor award.
• Clone High: Season 2's "For Your Consideration" tries to sell itself as a heartbreaking, award-worthy story from the get-go. It tells Mr. Butlertron's over-the-top tragic backstory (repeatedly referred to in-universe as "award-worthy"): he grew up in poverty (depicted in a Deliberately Monochrome style), left his family to become a prostitute, seemingly impregnated and married a client who then broke his heart, then lost his beloved (human) brother Wesley while out at sea. Along the way, it employs numerous Art Shifts, blatant religious and spiritual themes, and gratuitous artsy shots of beaches and sunsets. At the end of the episode, the clouds outright spell out "F.Y.C." to hammer it in.
• Family Guy gives us the self-explanatory "Emmy-Winning Episode." Peter and his family spend 20 minutes trying to copy the clichés of Emmy-winning shows to try and get one of their own. At one point, the committee phone up the Griffins and inform them that their effort were so bad, they were awarded a negative Emmy, in effect owing ATAS one Emmy.
• Pinky and the Brain: In "Brain's Song", Brain gets the idea to make an ultra-depressing movie and broadcast it to the entire world, counting on Earth's population being so saddened by the movie that they won't resist when he declares himself ruler of the world. The movie stars Brain as a football player who is forced to retire by an illness, and ends with the narrator (Pinky) driving home how awful his situation is by repeating the word "sad" several times. The plan almost works, until Brain starts shaking uncontrollably from the effects of standing on a vibrating miniature football field while filming the movie as he's announcing his takeover, and the sight of him shaking and stuttering is enough to snap everyone out of their depression, foiling his plan.
• The Simpsons:
  • Burt Reynolds describes his new film Fireball and Mudflap:
    "I play Jerry 'Fireball' Mudflap, a feisty Supreme Court justice who's searching for his birth mother while competing in a cross-country firetruck race. It's... garbage."
  • An entry form for Best Documentary nominations has entrants declare if their documentaries are "Holocaust-related" or "Non-Holocaust-related”.
  • When Marge Simpson attends the Sundance film festival, she discovers that all the films on display are extremely depressing (including themes like underprivileged transvestites, underprivileged hippies, and Chernobyl) and most of them have ironically upbeat titles.
• Tiny Toon Adventures:
  • In "Hare Today, Gone Tomorrow", when Buster pretends to suffocate in the cage Elmyra put him in, Hamton shows up to give him an award for "Best Death on Daytime Television".
  • In another episode, Meryl Streep receives an Oscar for "Best Ordering in a Restaurant". She puts it in a purse full of many other Oscars.

• A hilarious musical performance titled "A Comedian At The Oscars" actually took place at the 79th Academy Awards, featuring Will Ferrell lamenting how his comedies always get passed over for dramas. Jack Black joins him on stage and says they should fist-fight the dramatic actors in the audience to assert their dominance. John C. Reilly shows up and tells them that they should also do serious films from time to time like he does.
  Black: He's right! I'm gonna re-read that script about the guy who gets lead poisoning and then sues a major corporation, there's not a laugh in there!
  Ferrell: And I'm gonna take that project about the guy with no arms and legs who teaches gangbangers Hamlet!
  Reilly: Now you're talking!
  Ferrell: (singing) I'm gonna lose forty pounds to play Ralph Nader!
  Black: I'm gonna do that gay coal-mining film with James Spader!