The LGBT Community Was The Real Winner at Oscars

Making history award-by-award, last night’s Oscars was the queerest of them all as eight of the night’s top honours went to movies with queer themes. 

Bohemian Rhapsody, The Favourite and Green Book all took home awards, joining the queer-themed winners from years past.

That success includes one acting award for each film, meaning three out of the four acting Oscars went to queer roles, a hugely important success story for queer cinema.

Including Green Book on this list could be seen as a bit of a leap, the film focusses mainly on race issues in the Jim Crow South. However, it does reference the homosexuality of classical pianist Don Shirley in a few scenes.

While there has been a lot of debate over how the film depicts Shirley, you can’t deny that Mahershala Ali won Best Supporting Actor for playing a homosexual character, and not many actors have won awards for playing a gay role at all, so this must be celebrated.

Bohemian Rhapsody tells the story of Queen’s queer frontman Freddie Mercury and was the biggest winner of the night with four awards (Best Actor for Rami Malek, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing and Best Film Editing). The film also has made history as the highest grossing LGBT movie in box office history, taking $213 million domestically and over $600 million world wide.

The Favourite is the fictionalised story of Queen Anne (played by Olivia Colman) and her love affairs with advisor Sarah (Rachel Weisz) and servant Abigail (Emma Stone). The film sees Sarah and Abigail compete for the Queen’s affection and their position in Court.

The Favourite tied with Roma for most nominations (ten in total) yet only came away with one victory, Best Actress of Olivia Colman, which caused huge upset as it denied Glenn Close her long-overdue award. But, Colman’s win did lead to one of the best moments of the night, her acceptance speech:

Although this was a historic year for LGBT representation in Awards Season, the fact that none of the winning queer roles were played by LGBT actors is quite noticeable and the debate over should queer roles be solely played by queer actors rages on. But, one thing that cannot be denied is that representation is on the rise, queer stories are becoming the mainstream, and that can’t be a bad thing, can it?