When Milk wins the Oscar for Original Screenplay on February 22, it will be the first biopic to take the award in 26 years. Back then Gandhi faced some stiff competition, including two fellow Best Picture nominees, Tootsie and E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, as well as An Officer and a Gentleman and Diner. And three of these opposing titles were 1982’s three top grossing films. Gandhi’s main obstacle, though, was not one of the other nominees. It was the difficulty of winning a category that’s typically associated with originality. Plenty of movies based on true stories have been nominated for Original Screenplay, but that “based on” factor can be a drawback, and the Academy tends to favor scripts born completely out of the imagination here.

Unfortunately for Milk, that Academy disfavor has been strong for the past three decades, passing over such ‘nonfiction’ films as The Queen, Shine, Nixon, Braveheart, Bugsy, Hotel Rwanda, Erin Brockovich, The Aviator and Good Night, and Good Luck for more “creative” efforts like Little Miss Sunshine. But this year, the ‘fiction’ films nominated for Original Screenplay are not strong candidates, whether for critical, commercial or political reasons. So fortunately for Milk, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black will partly win the Oscar by default. Not all voters will be choosing Milk in a process of elimination, though. Some will actually see that Black has penned a great “original” biopic and that it is indeed the most deserving of the nominated screenplays.

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Lists of movies within movies are fairly common on the internet, enough that I now realize I need to finally see Bowfinger simply because I’ve counted about a million list makers in love with something titled “Chubby Rain.” And the lists are likely to keep on coming thanks to this week’s hot release, Tropic Thunder, which actually features two movies within (the Vietnam War film “Tropic Thunder” and the festival-winning making-of documentary “Rain of Madness”), as well as the upcoming How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which has spawned a popular fake movie trailer for an NC-17 film titled “Mother Theresa: The Making of a Saint” (previewed above). Yet until someone makes a Wikipedia page for “List of Fictional Films,” these blogged and forumed lists are necessary to keep us movie fans remembering those non-existent movies we wish existed.

Narrowing down to ten seemed to be difficult — fictional films have been at least nominally been created for tons of films about filmmaking, otherwise reflexive films, sketch comedies, spoofs, etc. — until I realized that a lot of these films within films are appropriately nominal or trailer- or clip-sized gags and would in reality be terrible (imagine actually watching the entirety of “Asses of Fire” from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut). Even “Je Vous Présente Paméla” (”Meet Pamela”) from Day for Night and the sci-fi film being made in 8½ would probably be major disappointments in actuality if you expected from them the work of Truffaut and Fellini, respectively.

So, I went mostly with fictional films that would probably be bad, but would at least be amusingly bad — though I purposefully avoided fictional porns, including those from Boogie Nights and The Big Lebowski, of which there are literally thousands:

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