This undated photograph released by Universal Studios shows actors Hugh Grant and Mandy Moore in a scene from "American Dreamz." The film, which opened Friday, is about an "American Idol"-type TV show hosted by a cynical Grant, which has a rural nobody in the form of Moore, relentlessly pursuing stardom.

Given that 65 million votes were cast in the "American Idol 3" finale, more than half the 122 million tallied in the 2004 presidential race, it was only a matter of time before a satirist took aim at American politics by using the TV show as ammunition.

Too bad, then, that "American Dreamz" writer-director Paul Weitz's cockeyed look at the popularity contest as social metaphor, mostly shoots blanks.

"Dreamz" is not FOTFL (fall-on-the-floor laughing). Nor is it LOL (laugh-out-loud). For the most part, it is :-() (huh?).

Weitz's subject is the trashing of American politics and values in the Dumpster of pop culture. He starts promisingly, by sorting citizens into three basic types, the starmaker, the would-be star, and the sucker.

The harshly lit film equates snarky starmaker Martin Tweed (Hugh Grant), the Simon Cowellesque host and judge of the top-rated TV show "American Dreamz," with snarky Vice President Sutter (Willem Dafoe), who possesses the sepulchral voice and chrome dome of Dick Cheney. Weitz frames these men as puppeteers pulling the strings of pop stars and presidents, and, by proxy, controlling America.

Tweed and Sutter are dastardly, the people they control are dupes, and everyone else dopes. Weitz lampoons the starmakers for condescending to Americans, but he himself is guilty of the same attitude. Like Tweed and Sutter, whose faces are frozen into permanent sneers, Weitz's stance toward most of the characters is one of smirking superiority.For a writer-director so compassionate toward often unsympathetic subjects in "American Pie," "About a Boy" and "In Good Company" (the first two co-written with his brother Chris), it seems out of character that Weitz would have such a jaundiced eye for those who make up his American mosaic. For a filmmaker who previously exhibited such perfect pitch, it's almost incomprehensible that this Weitz film is so tone-deaf.The only likable characters are ebullient Omer (Sam Golzari), a show-tune-loving reluctant Iraqi suicide bomber who comes to the O.C., and earnest William (Chris Klein), an American GI wounded in Iraq, who are mirror images.Weitz doesn't even get within shouting distance of the "Saturday Night Live" parodies of "American Idol" and President Bush. Nor, cast as versions of Laura and George W. Bush, do Marcia Gay Harden and Dennis Quaid do anything more than pretty good impersonations of the first lady and president. Similarly, as aspiring TV-show contestant Sally Kendoo, Mandy Moore turns in a creditable impersonation of Carrie Underwood.But their impersonations lack the sting of satire, something that Hugh Grant brings to his Cowell caricature of Martin Tweed. Grant plays it like a thirsty alley cat lapping up a tureen of curdled cream.