My utter disillusionment with the Oscars started early and has rarely been given cause to turn back to hope in the ensuing decades. This week, TCM showed a couple of classics, back to back, that took me right back to the moment my “Oscars shmoscars” disdain began and the later confirmation that Hollywood was rather missing the boat, or the point, when it came to who to honor and when.

“Being There” (1979) was the late, great Peter Sellers’ last shot at an acting Academy Award. My favorite comic actor lost to the always-worthy, slow-to-be-honored Dustin Hoffman in a movie even he realized was a “soap opera” (“Kramer vs. Kramer”). Sellers died mere months later, one of the funniest screen actors ever never honored for his brilliance.

Then and now, Oscar has barely a grudging respect for comedy.

Then, in the spring of ’83, Peter O’Toole completed a comeback with an Oscar nomination for his decade-erasing, self-depracating turn in the greatest comical performance of his screen career,“My Favorite Year.” He was nominated for playing an aging, boozing, shallow matinee idol who realizes his limitations better than most.

“I’m not an ACTOR, I’m a MOVIE star!”

He lost to Ben Kingsley’s mesmerizing, also larger-than-life performance in the title role in the lovely but too-stately “Gandhi.”

O’Toole was already in the midst of a “comeback” thanks to his Oscar-nominated turn in “The Stuntman.” “My Favorite Year” wasn’t O’Toole’s last shot Oscar nomination, and he’d eventually earn an honorary Academy Award late in life. But the sting of Oscar voters not grasping what a perfect little bauble of showbiz lore “My Favorite Year” is colored my view of “Awards Season” from thence onwards.

Awards be damned. It’s the movie that matters. And its timeless appeal is ageing like fine wine. Based on a piece of Hollywood lore, and taking us inside production and the “writer’s room” during “The Golden Age of (Live) Television,” “My Favorite Year” is nostalgia and myth, warmth and wit wrapped up in a tale of a fading, flawed “legend” living up to that honorific one last time.

The story was very loosely inspired by the real-life appearance of high-mileage swashbuckler and notorious playboy Errol Flynn’s appearance on the variety revue series “Your Show of Shows” in the early ’50s. Mel Brooks, Neil Simon and Woody Allen were writers there. Brooks produced the movie that would lampoon and exaggerate “what might have happened” into a comical romp.

“Your Show of Shows” became “Comedy Cavalcade.” Star Sid Caesar became King Kaiser, vamped and bullied to life by Joseph Bologna. Errol Flynn became Alan Swann, a Great Brit ham and swashbuckler on screen (in his day), a rake and incurable drunk off screen, played by O’Toole as a man who knew how to embody both.

The writer’s room mimicked “Your Show of Shows,” too, with braying Bill Macy scripting the show with Alice De Salvo as a sassy version of writer-actress Selma Diamond (the future “Night Court” stars herself cast as the hilarious wardrobe mistress) and Basil Hoffman as a thinly-disguised version of “shy” writer Neil Simon.

Newcomer and future “Perfect Strangers” star Mark Linn-Baker plays a more Brooks than Allen archetype, the Jewish “kid” from Brooklyn who worships the problematic Swann, is assigned to be his “minder” and get him on set sober enough to rehearse and to play his part “live,” and who narrates the story.

“Asked to leave” college kid-writer Benjy and co-babysitter Alfie (Tony DiBenedetto), “Mr. Swann’s favorite driver” are charged with hiding the liquor and limiting the intake when the hiding doesn’t work, enabling Swann’s womanizing, “controlling” his hell-raising and basically tracking him down after any and all benders.

“Alfredo, you needn’t wait. We shan’t need the car any more. We’re going to throw up in the park and then walk home.”

Benjy’s idol will teach him about “women” (Jessica Harper plays Katherine, Benjy’s disinterested love-interest at work), how to cut a dashing figure in The Stork Club, in a limo or on a purloined police horse in Central Park. And Swann will be exposed to the Big Jewish Family (headed by the great Lainie Kazan), the perils of “live” television and his own personal and professional limitations in the weeklong run up to showtime.

There’s even a union racketeer, played by veteran heavy and TV cowboy Cameron Mitchell, to be contended with and imitated to a T by Bologna’s brash and gauche King Kaiser.

The jokes are a steady stream of sitcom zingers, ranging from lukewarm to sizzling.

“Katherine, Jews know two things: suffering and where to find great Chinese food.”

Swann’s headfirst tumble “entrance” into the show’s offices infuriates the head writer.

“He’s plastered!”

“So are some of the finest erections in Europe,” O’Toole intones, with an eyeroll as Swann passes out.

Swann recognizes Benjy’s mom’s Filipino boxer/spouse.

“Are you still in the fight game?”

“In a way. I married Benjy’s mother.”

O’Toole is a riot of giggles, taking tumbles, staggering through mayhem of his character’s own creation, pretty much first scene to last. He carries the picture with elan and self-mocking wit and lands a laugh in almost every scene.

Comic actor turned director Richard Benjamin let his stars carry the load in this sound-stage bound comedy. That old-fashioned approach suits the film’s nostalgic tone, right down to Benjy’s voice-over reminiscences of “my favorite year,” 1954.

“My Favorite Year” is tamer than most of the Mel Brooks comedies that preceded it, with frequent Brooks writing collaborator Norman Steinberg toning down the vulgarity and turning his skills towards more TV friendly funniness. I had the pleasure of interviewing Steinberg when he created a zinger-laden sitcom a few years later, “Doctor Doctor.” The veteran joke-and-shtick writer was most interested in talking about “that putz, Leonard Nimoy,” who’d “ruined” his Gene Wilder/Christine Lahti rom-com “Funny About Love” by messing with Steinberg’s script.

“The nerve,” Steinberg joked of “Mister ‘Three Men and a Baby'” messing with The Comic Master’s gags.

The film made from his best (co-written with Dennis Palumbo) script still plays, largely due to the nostalgia that ties it to the first sitcom set largely in “the writer’s room” of such a show — “The Dick Van Dyke Show” — and all the writer’s room comedies to follow — “30 Rock,” “The Garry Shandling Show” and even “Late Night with Seth Myers.”

“Old fashioned” extends to the film’s treatment of womanizing actors and alcohol abuse, a lighthearted “Days of Wine and Roses” remembrance from an era before Mothers Against Drunk Driving would lead the way in showing alcohol’s risks and true costs.

Casting Diamond, the “model” for Rose Marie’s character on the “Dick Van Dyke Show,” and Broadway and MGM musical legend Adolph Green as “Cavalcade of Comedy’s” producer underscore the film’s mission — heralding the unheralded gag writers from an age that created jobs for legions of them.

Neil Simon’s take on those variety show writer’s room years, “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” premiered in the mid-90s, and I found myself covering that show and “Jake’s Women” in out-of-town tryouts in N.C., interviewing Simon as he tinkered with the plays before taking them to Broadway. Even he admitted topping “My Favorite Year” was a tall order.

“My Favorite Year” even made its own way to Broadway, as a musical that flopped in 1992. It can’t have been star Tim Curry’s fault. Somebody should take another crack at that idea.

But until they do, we have the funniest film of 1982 to relish and re-watch and maybe knock one back in tribute to the Oscar that O’Toole certainly deserved for sending up his profession and his generation of British stage and screen tipplers.

“Mr. Swann, I was supposed to watch you, remember?

“Good,” he says, taking a bottle in hand. “Watch this.”

Rating: PG, alcohol abuse, comic violence, suggestive humor

Cast: Peter O’Toole, Mark Linn-Baker, Jessica Harper, Joseph Bologna, Lainie Kazan, Bill Macy, Annie DeSalvo and Cameron Mitchell.

Credits: Directed by Richard Benjamin, scripted by Norman Steinberg and Dennis Palumbo. An MGM release on Youtube, Sling, Amazon, other streamers.

Running time: 1:32