Three actors learn that their respective performances in the film "Home for Purim," a drama set in the mid-1940s American South, are generating award-season buzz.

Hollywood send-up. No-name actors are making a low-budget period drama called "Home for Purim," when an anonymous post on the Internet suggests that one performance is Oscar-worthy. Then, two more cast members get Oscar-related press: buzz in "Variety" and appearances on TV prompt the studio executives to insist on changes in the script in anticipation of a blockbuster. Jump ahead a few months to the days before Oscar nominees are announced: just the possibility of a nomination has changed the actors' lives. Agents, publicists, make-up artists, local celebrity reporters, and other bit players round out the backstage ensemble. Hooray for Hollywood!—<[email protected]>

It's the summer, and a small movie called "Home for Purim" is being filmed at equally small Sunfish Studios. It is the first screenplay by playwrights Lane Iverson and Philip Koontz. The four leads are veterans Marilyn Hack and Victor Allan Miller, who have little renown or name/face recognition despite their years in the business, and relative newcomers Callie Webb and Brian Chubb, who are in a relationship in real life against their on screen relationship as siblings. Things on the set are typical of any movie, having its fair share of ups and downs, the latter which include Iverson and Koontz having issues with actions of the director, Jay Berman, and the studio suits needing to put their unwanted two-cents in. The movie is expected to be gobbled up at the box office by movies with bigger budgets and bigger names. Things start to change when film journalists who have made it on set report that the movie has Oscar written all over it, certain cast members being singled out for possible recognition. Although those cast members are outwardly excited by the praise, they do not want to demonstrate that they truly do crave that Oscar recognition. After the movie is released during awards season, it, including for the previously mentioned cast members, does receive all the praise in its finished product to match the hype during production. Those cast members who have been singled out do the talk show circuit to promote the movie but more so to promote themselves as being friendly to the audience of the specific talk show, regardless of if that is who they are in real life, all in an effort to get that coveted Oscar nomination for their performance. What happens in their immediate future is affected by the goings-on of the morning of the Oscar nominations announcement.—Huggo