Posted on 02/11/2003 12:21:42 PM PST by Right Wing Co-Conspirator
HOW GAY IS OSCAR?
I guess we wll know the answer to that, but this year's nominees are almost a hetero-shut-out. An unusually well-informed movie buff friend sent me the following email:
Today's Oscar nominations must set a record of sorts for gays in Hollywood. Best Picture nominee "Chicago" was produced by Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, both openly gay, while another Best Picture nominee, "The Hours," had openly-gay Scott Rudin as producer. (The Pulitzer Prize winning book on which it is based was, of course, written by openly gay Michael Cunningham.) Two of the nominees for Best Director, Rob Marshall of "Chicago" and Pedro Almodovar of "Talk To Me", are openly gay. Nicole Kidman is nominated as Best Actress for her portrayal of bisexual Virginia Woolf in "The Hours," Ed Harris is nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of a gay man with AIDS in the same film, while Meryl Streep is nominated for Best Supporting Actress as his lesbian best friend. Selma Hayek is up for Best Actress for her portrayal of bisexual painter Frida Kahlo in "Frida". Pedro Almodovar is also nominated for Best Original Screenplay, where he is joined by openly gay Todd Haynes, who wrote and directed "Far From Heaven." Juliette Moore is nominated as Best Actress for that film, in which she plays the wife of a closeted gay man (played by Dennis Quaid, whose omission from the list of nominees will be noted as one of this year's Oscar gaffes). Another original screenplay nomination went to "Y Tu Mam Tambien," in which two young straight men end up having sex with each other. "Lilo & Stitch," whose co-director Dean DeBlois is openly gay, is up for Best Animated Feature. Kander and Ebb are up for Best Song (as is Eminem). And the Dutch film nominated for Best Foreign Film, "Zus & Zo," is a comedy about how a family deals with the news that the brother they all thought was gay decides to marry a woman. Stephen Daldry did not direct it.
Note that this is all related to people who are openly gay. The closet is crumbling - even in that most privately homophobic enclave, Hollywood
Sorry...that old South Park line just kept rattling around in my head.
I've always enjoyed Nicholson's movies but not considered him a fine actor, because he's always seemed to be playing himself. However, he does a great job as Schmidt, a very different character. An excellent movie!
After having an 850 year old feeble frog creature who uses a cane and dies within 40 years suddenly leap around like he was Kermit's nephew(what George a simple lightsaber battle wasn't good enough?), that really wouldn't surprise me. Then again it might be funny to hear Yoda say to Obiwan, "mmmmmmmmmmm....Out of closet I am, queer I must be"
. . .had no idea just how busy these folks had been this year agenda-wise.
Thought they must be slapping themselves on the back over 'The Hours' and with such a good cast yet. Now I see they have a whole lot of slappin to do. . .
Bad jokes, on us.
Well I own it, and have seen it enough to quote it word-for-word. Each to his own tastes, of course, and I can see how people would be able to get a liberal message out of it, but I don't. There is an element of "accept people because they are different", but the "different" that Lilo was portrayed as was so accurate that two women I know swear that they wrote it based on their lives. It's simply a great story, with great characters, and some of the funniest dialogue I've ever seen. And the one thread I saw about this movie here gave it nothing but positive reviews.
The rest of your comment: I don't know what you mean. Please educate this slow learner.
Not a problem. Whatever percentage you might want to consider a "normal" gay percentage (and I know there's plenty of debate about that), it doesn't apply here the way that it normally would since there are twice as many possibilities to consider. An actor is, for our purposes, considered a seperate person from the character they play.
So let's take the Best Actress award as an example. There are five actresses nominated, and each of those actresses plays a separate character; so that's 10 people to consider. If you go by the traditional 10% figure (again, disputes noted), then on average, at least one of those 10 would be gay.
Add to this the fact that there are lots of awards that were not mentioned, and lots of people who worked on the movies mentioned that were not analyzed. Add into that also the fact that this is one year, and spikes are to be expected in any random data set. Throw it all together, and what Andrew lists simply isn't cause for alarm (though I wonder how many people here realize that Andrew's gay, and was posting it as what he saw as a good sign).
I'm not saying that Hollywood doesn't often have agendas. I'm just saying that this doesn't show it.
I disagree. Two of the nominees for Best Director are openly gay. If we accept the 10% guideline, there must be 20 people nominated in that category, with 2 of them being gay. How about Best Actress? Two of the characters are gay. Are there 10 nominees in this category (10 actors + 10 characters = 20 people, 10% of 20 gives us Nicole Kidman and Selma Hayek).
Look at the numbers, far more than 10% of these major people are gay. And if one accepts the more standard 2% estimate, then you can see that gays are FAR more represented in the Big Names than in the general population.
I would think that penile contact is that last thing lesbians would want.
Again, it's rare in any random data set that you'll get a perfect match with expect ratios. Roll a ten-sided dice ten times and see how normal your results look. 2 out of 10 is not outside of standard deviation. 2 out of 5 isn't even.
But even on that, what about Best Actor? Looks like a strikeout there. What about all of the other categories not even mentioned here? What about all of the other people who worked on the movies mentioned (directors, writers, choreographers, technicians, voice-overs, key grips, coffee boys...)? Getting worked up over a data point is not rational, it's paranoid. And again, I say this is someone who despises Hollywood's leftist slant (I'm still fuming over the butchering of the American Revolution they called "The Patriot").
Look at the numbers, far more than 10% of these major people are gay. And if one accepts the more standard 2% estimate, then you can see that gays are FAR more represented in the Big Names than in the general population.
If I'd known 49 straights for every non-straight I've ever known, I think I'd have to rent out a stadium to talk to the whole lot of them.
You think? It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that is was a cinematic sleeping pill with ridiculous logical inconsistencies?
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