“Somewhere after the first awful hour of Milk my very kind friend who doesn’t happen to work in the movie business, looked over at me and said, ‘This is a really, really bad movie.’”

That’s how Catholic screenwriter Barbara Nicolosi begins her review of Milk, Hollywood’s hagiography about murdered homosexual politician Harvey Milk. The movie in the running for eight Oscars at this Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony.

Milk’s nominations include some of the Academy’s biggest prizes, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Sean Penn’s portrayal of Milk.

It may be a darling with the Oscar voters, but Nicolosi attributes Milk’s popularity solely to political correctness.

Judged on its cinematic content, she says, Milk is a very sour effort.

“The film fails basically because there just isn’t any material in the biography to convincingly transform the radically narcissist, sex-obsessed community organizer, Milk into Gandhi,” Nicolosi writes. “They had to work so hard to sanitize this creepy dude, that they ended up stripping the movie of any potential interest. It’s a bore.”

Nicolosi says an authentic biography of the life of Milk, the openly homosexual San Francisco city supervisor who was murdered in 1978 along with San Francisco Mayor George Mosconi by former city supervisor Dan White, could have been insightful had it explored “the twisted soul who over the course of his life drove four of his five lovers to commit suicide.”

Said Nicolosi, “The funny thing is, there actually is a story in the life of Harvey Milk, but for propaganda reasons, the film makers didn’t want to tell that story.”

And according to Nicolosi, Penn’s acting performance is as curdled as the rest of the movie: “Penn’s Milk is all one note — wide-eyed and full of self-righteous passion with moments of giddiness bordering on silly.”

Nicolosi concludes her review, “There are a lot of lies in Milk — mainly sins of omission, but many other downright distortions. The movie will fade and die a quick death once it has served its new purpose to be a forum over which Hollywood people can decry Prop 8 during awards season.”