Arts & Entertainment
Oscar nominations: The good, the bad and the predictable
Queer movies seemed like an afterthought in this year’s nominations
2023 was a very queer year at the movies, but you might not be able to tell that from looking at the nominations for the 96th Annual Academy Awards (aka the Oscars), which were announced early on Tuesday morning at the Motion Picture Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, Calif.
It’s true there were a few significant nods included for queer actors and/or actors in queer roles, as well as for films which included queer characters or subject matter and/or the creatives behind them, and we don’t want to seem unappreciative of that progress, even if we suspect it might be due to the Academy’s new guideline that a film must meet at least two out of four standards of representation and inclusion to qualify for nomination, implemented this year for the first time; even so, it’s hard not to feel a bit like an afterthought when so many queer movies, performers and creators that stood out among the year’s crop of releases — many of which scored recognition from multiple other awards bodies — have been left out of the lineup.
Indeed, it can almost be said that this year’s Oscar ballot is more notable for its snubs than for its inclusions, and that doesn’t just apply to the LGBTQ community.
The most egregious omission, in fact, is also the most predictable: The failure of Academy voters to nominate Greta Gerwig as Best Director for her industry-shaking efforts at the helm of “Barbie,” a film which managed to jump start the big screen’s box office by bringing audiences back to theaters in droves and sent more shock waves resonating through our culture than all the year’s other movies combined.
Though the movie — which earned eight nominations in total, including acting nods for supporting players Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera — made the cut for Best Picture, and Gerwig was nominated in the Best Adapted Screenplay category (alongside partner and now-husband Noah Baumbach), her name is glaringly absent from the list of contenders.
Add to this the equally perplexing snub of Margot Robbie — who was also an executive producer of the film — as Best Leading Actress, and it’s difficult not to see an unspoken reprimand being delivered to two strong women for daring to shake up the industry’s status quo by building a blockbuster movie hit around an unapologetically feminist core.
Still, with its eight nods, “Barbie” — which topped our list of the Best Queer-centric Films of 2023 — made a strong showing, though other of the year’s biggest titles received more. “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s existential epic about the creator of the atomic bomb, unsurprisingly led the pack with 13, followed by Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things” with 11 and Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” with 10. Each of these four films are competing as Best Picture — and all have a strong chance at the trophy, though “Oppenheimer” is shaping up to be a sweeping juggernaut for the season.
Also nominated in the category are Bradley Cooper’s Bernstein biopic “Maestro” and Cord Jefferson’s late-season under-the-radar satire “American Fiction,” both of which include significant queer narratives in their storylines.
Expanding on the “good news” from the Oscars announcement, the Best Actor category includes a nomination for out gay actor Colman Domingo for his star turn as the titular out gay civil rights hero in “Rustin,” as well as for Cooper’s performance as the bisexual Bernstein in “Maestro.” The rest of the field is made up of Cillian Murphy (“Oppenheimer”), Paul Giamatti (“The Holdovers”) and Jeffrey Wright (“American Fiction”).
Notably absent from the race is out Irish actor Andrew Scott, who was considered a strong front runner for his leading turn in out British filmmaker Andrew Haigh’s “All of Us Strangers.”
For Best Leading Actress, a nomination went to queer ally Annette Benning for playing the title role in “Nyad,” as well as to Carey Mulligan for her portrayal of Bernstein’s loyal wife in “Maestro.”
Additionally, Lily Gladstone made history by becoming the first Indigenous American to be nominated in the category for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” though she has stated in interviews that she identifies as “middle-gender.”
Rounding out the race are Sandra Hüller (“Anatomy of a Fall”) and Emma Stone (“Poor Things”); at this point, it’s probably too early to predict the winners — there are a lot of politics involved in the final stretch before the big night — but, in this category, it’s hard to imagine anyone but Stone taking the prize.
In the supporting categories, iconic out actress Jodie Foster scored for her role as the title character’s trainer and BFF in “Nyad,” and Danielle Brooks made the cut for her show-stealing performance in the queer-inclusive musical “The Color Purple”). Their competition comes from Ferrera, Emily Blunt (“Oppenheimer”) and Joyce Da’Vine Randolph (“The Holdovers”).
On the Supporting Actor side, Sterling K. Brown was nominated for playing the lead character’s recently-out gay brother in “American Fiction,” while Gosling’s masculinity-skewing performance was “Kenough” to score him a nod for “Barbie.”
The other contenders are Robert DeNiro (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), Robert Downey, Jr. (“Oppenheimer”), and Mark Ruffalo (“Poor Thiings”); look to Downey as the probable winner, but Ruffalo’s against-type turn could pull off an upset.
It would be easy to go down the list and point out all the films and people that were unexpectedly passed over for this finals round in Hollywood’s Awards Sweepstakes — the most obvious, apart from Gerwig and Robbie, are Leonardo DiCaprio’s lead performance in “Killers of the Flower Moon”), but we can’t avoid mentioning the shutout of overtly queer standout movies like “All of Us Strangers” or “Saltburn” (from filmmaker Emerald Fennell, also part of the cadre of female power players behind “Barbie”), which failed to score nods in any category despite multiple nominations and wins from other awards bodies.
Yet, looking to the positive, despite the disappointment of so many surprise omissions, there are some strong steps forward represented for the queer community in this year’s nominations, with both Domingo and Foster standing within reach of becoming the first openly queer actor to win an Oscar for playing an openly queer character.
As noted above, Gladstone could also become the first Indigenous American to win a Leading Actress trophy, and though it wouldn’t be a first, a win for either “Maestro” or “American Fiction” would add another film with strong queer storylines to the list of Oscar’s Best Pictures.
Another milestone worth mentioning: with his nomination as Best Director for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorcese has become the living filmmaker with the most Oscar nominations (10) and second only to William Wyler (12) for the most of all time.
That may not be a “queer” record, but it’s definitely a cool one.
For a complete list of the nominations, visit the Oscar website.
Movies
‘Leviticus’ demonizes homophobia for gripping queer horror yarn
A genuinely engaging and terrifying supernatural drama
There’s something about horror films that makes them particularly apt as a vehicle for allegory. Vampires, zombies, ghosts, or seemingly death-proof serial killers can all easily be seen as metaphors for some lurking threat from the “dark side” of our own collective psyche, and stories about them are almost always cautionary tales that remind us that it’s the “dark side” of our own nature that we must confront in order for the danger to be eliminated.
This subtext has always been present in the genre, of course; but with the so-called “renaissance” of horror cinema that has taken place across the past decade or so, modern filmmakers in the genre have made increasingly bold choices with regard to how “sub” it is. “Get Out” or “Sinners” need no explanation to get across their allegorical points about racism, nor does “The Substance” require an expert to recognize its satirical observations about the toxic cultural obsession with youth and beauty. These are movies that wear their proverbial hearts on their sleeves, instead of masking them behind layers of cliched and “coded” plot tropes.
The same can definitely be said of “Leviticus,” the debut feature from Australian writer/director Adrian Chiarella, which not only hinges on a conceit that has obvious associations with its not-so-hidden themes but tips off the whole thing by its very choice of title – a reference to the Old Testament book frequently cited by fundamentalist bigots as so-called proof of God’s condemnation of homosexuality, which sets up exactly what we are in for before the opening credits even begin to roll.
Set in a conservative rural town (in the Australian state of Victoria, though it will feel distinctly familiar to anyone who grew up in similar communities anywhere else in the world), it centers on Naim (Joe Bird), a teen boy newly transplanted by his mother (Mia Wasikowska) – who has ties to a fundamentalist Christian enclave there – after the death of his father. Their new life – like seemingly everything else in the community – is tied directly to the church, which makes it doubly inconvenient when Ryan (Stacy Clausen), son of the town’s presiding preacher, invites him for an after-school “hangout” which leads to a furtive make-out session in the town’s deserted mill.
Though the boys promise each other to keep it secret, they are both soon “outed” to their parents and subjected to a ritual performed by a mysterious “deliverance healer” (Nicholas Hope), intended to “protect” them from their “sinful” impulses. Soon after, a series of mysterious and violent encounters lead them to investigate local rumors around incidents involving other local teens – and the revelation that the ritual has summoned a malevolent entity, which appears to them as the person they are most attracted to (in this case, each other) and unleashes its murderous wrath when they give in to temptation. Their only chance of staying safe is to stay apart – unless they can find a way to defeat the supernatural force that has been turned loose against them.
Yes, it’s all very obvious. There is no attempt to mask what Chiarella’s movie is really about, though the word itself – like the biblical book with which it shares a title – is never spoken aloud in the film. It’s hardly a spoiler, though, to confirm that “Leviticus” is a story about homophobia. From its obvious evocation of real-life “conversion therapy” to its more subtle exploration of the secrecy and social shaming that surrounds same-sex love for so many teens growing up in an environment of fundamentalist religious tradition, every nuance of the film’s ingenious premise announces the clear intent of its messaging: homophobia is the true evil at work here, and its deadly power lies in its ability to make queer people afraid of being who they are.
While some might argue that presenting such an “on the nose” allegory in what is ostensibly “just” a horror film is a heavy-handed choice, we suggest – in this case, at least – that it’s exactly what makes the movie work so effectively.
From the very first scenes (after a prologue that ominously hints at the arcane evil that will soon come into play), we are invested in Naim and Ryan, whose tentative-but-joyous afternoon tryst is bound to trigger our own individual memories of adolescent sexual awakening, and whom we hope will be able to navigate their way through to the other side – even before the introduction of supernatural hate demons being summoned to kill them by using their own feelings for each other as a trap. They’re almost a definitive queer “coming of age” archetype, echoing generations of treasured “first time” memories and “what if“ fantasies about what might have been; we want them to be together, to overcome the otherworldly forces deployed to keep them apart – and when their romance is distorted, inverting their natural attraction into fear and mistrust, it’s their own inability to resist the pull they feel toward each other that continues to put them in danger.
That emotional stake is the anchor of “Leviticus,” which lends an imperative to what might otherwise be a campy B-movie thriller and turns it into a genuinely engaging – and therefore terrifying – supernatural drama that is all the more powerful for playing to our hearts. Much of this effect hinges on the chemistry between its two young stars (which hits just the right pitch between irresistible hormonal urge and inseparable soul connection), but it’s also underscored by the irony of their being immersed within a culture that would rather destroy them than allow them to exist outside its traditional norms.
Nevertheless, while “Leviticus” succeeds by making us identify with its cult-crossed teenage lovers, it pays off by delivering not just a genuinely unsettling, profoundly disturbing, and unflinchingly brutal personification of religious bigotry at its most cruelly hateful, but by providing a tense and terrifying horror scenario that works on a pure “genre” level. Simply put, even setting aside any wider subtext about the deadly consequences of homophobia, it’s a creepy, nerve-wracking ride.
A critical hit as part of the Sundance Festival’s “Midnight” section earlier this year, “Leviticus” went into theatrical release on June 19, the latest in a continuing trend of fresh and inventive films that has elevated the horror movie to new levels of critical appreciation. For us, it’s worth singling out as a boldly original expression of queer experience, elegantly constructed from the reinterpreted formulas of a genre that has always had particular draw for those in our community who knew how to read between the lines.
The difference is, this time we don’t have to – the message is spelled out loud and clear, and that in itself is enough to make it feel a little bit like empowerment, at a time when we could all use as much of it as we can get.
Friday, June 26
Trans Discussion Group will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This event is intended to provide an emotionally and physically safe space for trans people and those who may be questioning their gender identity/expression to join together in community and learn from one another. For more details, email [email protected].
DC Bird Alliance will host “Second Annual Ride for Pride” at 9 a.m. at the Yards Marina. This event is for celebrating community, belonging, and our shared connection to nature. Together, we’ll enjoy a guided one-hour boat ride departing from The Yards Marina, exploring the river’s wildlife, history, and ongoing restoration. Along the way, participants may spot Ospreys, herons, egrets, cormorants, Bald Eagles, turtles, and other species that call the Anacostia home. For more details, visit Eventbrite.
Saturday, June 27
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Brunch” at 11 a.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar & Restaurant. This fun weekly event brings the DMV area LGBTQ community, including allies, together for delicious food and conversation. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
“Sunshine: A Sapphic Pride Day Party” will be at 1 p.m. at Spark Social. This is a patio party for queer women & sapphics 35+. For more details, visit Eventbrite.
Sunday, June 28
Trap Laughsss Pride Comedy Night will be at 7 p.m. at Sid’s Gold Request Room. This in-person event is where comedy meets Pride, bringing you hilarious performances that’ll have you rolling in the aisles. Whether you’re here to celebrate or just enjoy some fantastic jokes, this night is all about fun, community, and laughs. Don’t miss out on the best comedy bash around! More details are on Eventbrite.
Monday, June 29
“Center Aging: Monday Coffee Klatch” will be at 10 a.m. on Zoom. This is a social hour for older LGBTQ+ adults. Guests are encouraged to bring a beverage of choice. For more information, contact Adam ([email protected]).
Tuesday, June 30
The DC Center for the LGBTQ+ Community will host a screening of “Swann Queen” at 7 p.m. This is a short film by Lcedeño Miller inspired by the true story of William Dorsey Swann – considered one of the world’s first drag queens. Billy Swann and their brother Dan are preparing to host their third masquerade ball. When the police raid the party, Billy must decide whether to run or resist. Swann Queen is a story about community, survival, and the legacy of LGBTQ+ resistance in Washington, D.C. Screening followed by conversation. For more details, visit the Center’s website.
Wednesday, July 1
Job Club will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom upon request. This is a weekly job support program to help job entrants and seekers, including the long-term unemployed, improve self-confidence, motivation, resilience and productivity for effective job searches and networking — allowing participants to move away from being merely “applicants” toward being “candidates.” For more information, email [email protected] or visit www.thedccenter.org/careers.
Thursday, July 2
The DC Center for the LGBTQ+ Community’s Fresh Produce Program will be held all day at the Center. People will be informed on Wednesday at 5 p.m. if they are picked to receive a produce box. No proof of residency or income is required. For more information, email [email protected] or call 202-682-2245.
Virtual Yoga Class will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This free weekly class is a combination of yoga, breath work and meditation that allows LGBTQ+ community members to continue their healing journey with somatic and mindfulness practices. For more details, visit the The DC Center for the LGBTQ+ Community’s website.
The Baltimore Orioles will take on the Washington Nationals on Friday, June 26 at 7 p.m. for Pride Night at Oriole Park.
The first 15,000 fans will receive an exclusive Pride Night Orioles jersey. The Washington Blade is a media sponsor of this event.
To purchase tickets, visit Orioles.com/Tickets.
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