WILL OSCARS PROVE HOLLYWOOD IS STILL A FOUR-LETTER TOWN?

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. 

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.

But, as community activist and six-time Emmy-winning daytime TV writer Patrick Mulcahey recently noted in the Huffington Post, Dallas Buyers Club mindfully erases the fact that it was gay men – and not straight people – who were at the forefront fighting for AIDS drugs.

“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.