Risk in limiting current with light bulbs in parallel
Yeah, you can do that.

Also, incandescent lightbulbs (not CFL/LEDs of course) have a desirable property here: when the filament is cold, resistance is much lower. This means much less voltage sag at low currents than a resistor would offer.

Check out this answer, everything you need is there.

Now, for AC, the thermal mass of the filament is small, but it is enough to smooth out temperature variations across mains cycles, so the resistor will stay roughly the same during a cycle, and your sine should look good. 

If there are rectifiers after your transformer, your current won't be a sine anyway, but a series of spikes. Your filament will average them over time, allowing max current to be exceeded during the rectifier pulses, but not on average (which is useful).