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No Oscars for Michael Douglas and Matt Damon in Behind The Candalabra |
Bugs' op-ed on the 2014 Academy Awards originally ran in the February 2014 issue of Fugues magazine.
I don’t know how
much more I can take of straight film critics and audiences fawning over how brave
Jared Leto and Michael Douglas are as straight men for playing, respectively, a
transgender woman in the film Dallas
Buyers Club and a gay man in the TV movie Behind the Candelabra.
Don’t get me wrong: Both actors played their roles to the hilt onscreen. It’s just the way they’ve acknowledged the accolades offscreen that’s really rubbing me the wrong way.
Don’t get me wrong: Both actors played their roles to the hilt onscreen. It’s just the way they’ve acknowledged the accolades offscreen that’s really rubbing me the wrong way.
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Will Leto and McConaughey clean up at the Oscars? |
Lets start with Dallas Buyers Club. Leto’s portrayal of
transgender woman Rayon was transcendent, and Matthew McConaughey’s outsized
performance as the real-life Texan homophobe Ron Woodroof who loves rodeo,
drugs, booze and loose women – and whose chance discovery in 1985 that he has
HIV and a T-cell count of 9 – is also worthy of an Oscar.
“What is largely missing is the sense that Ron’s efforts are part of a larger movement,” the New York Times review of Dallas Buyers Club pointed out, while Variety swooned over McConaughey as “a redneck bigot who becomes the unlikely savior to a generation of gay men frightened by a disease they don't yet understand.”
Really? That’s not how I remember it.
Au contraire, it was the LGBT community that saved everybody else’s ass.
But that is also my point: Dallas Buyers Club is a movie that should have been made 25 years ago – and with a gay hero as the main character – but that this film could only be made today with a straight hero tells you everything you need to know about commercial filmmaking in Hollywood.
Like I have long said, Hollywood is a four-letter town.
Steven Soderbergh faced the same hurdles in Tinseltown when he made Behind The Candelabra, the award-winning docudrama about Liberace.