On March 2, Hollywood’s elite will gather at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles for the glitziest night of the year — The 97th Academy Awards. When the Oscar-cast goes live on ABC Sunday evening — and, for the first time ever, simultaneously streams on Hulu — seven LGBTQ individuals will sit in hushed anticipation at the possibility of winning Hollywood’s highest honors.

For a body often criticized for its lack of diversity and inclusivity, and with the arts under a prolonged political attack from far-right politicians, Sunday night offers a number of potentially groundbreaking moments for queer representation in front of and behind the screen.

An unabashedly queer film leads in laurels this year. With thirteen nominations ranging from Best Makeup and Hairstyling to the night’s grand prize, Best Picture, Jaques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez stands out as one of the most nominated — and potentially most audacious — films ever.

A musical melodrama about a Mexican cartel leader transitioning, as the movie indelicately puts it in one number, “from man to woman, from penis to vagina,” the film has been riding high on waves of accolades since it began picking up awards at the Cannes Film Festival last May. None other than John Waters, the legendary queer filmmaker and putative “Prince of Puke,” named Emilia Pérez one of his ten favorite films of the year.

In addition to nominations for the film’s cinematography, editing, sound, music (both original score and original song), writing (adapted screenplay), and directing, the Academy bestowed the Netflix-backed feature with a nod for Best International Feature Film.

Read Next

‘Last Breath’ is a Riveting Disaster Drama

Zoe Saldaña, who picked up wins from the Screen Actors Guild, the Golden Globes, the Critic’s Choice Awards, and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for her supporting role in the film, stands poised to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. And historically, the award body’s Best Actress nomination for Karla Sofía Gascón, who plays the titular Emilia before and after her transition, is the first for an openly trans person in an acting category and only the third for an openly trans person at all.

But for its many accolades, Emilia Pérez has also received tremendous blowback — and often not from the most expected corners. In November, GLAAD criticized the film as a “step backward for trans representation” on screen. Similarly, critics and advocacy groups have condemned the film’s portrayal of contemporary Mexico and its insensitivity towards real-world issues of cartel violence and drug trafficking.

Written and directed by a French man, photographed in France, and starring American and Spanish women in its principal roles, the film appears to critics like JP Brammer “like if a Chilean director made a musical about the Jan. 6 insurrection and cast mostly Thai people.” And all of this comes before the discovery of a trove of vitriolic tweets by Gascón denigrating everyone from George Floyd to the entire Muslim community recently sent the actress on an increasingly bizarre and belligerent apology tour that briefly caused both Audiard and Netflix to publicly distance themselves from her.

Should Gascón or Emilia Pérez, in general, come away empty-handed on Sunday, at the very least, the film and its star have made history and exemplified the complexities — our capacity for both the good and the lamentable — of the contemporary LGBTQ experience.

Read Next

Republicans in 9 States Push to Overturn Gay Marriage

Aside from Emilia Pérez, one other narrative feature in the mix makes noticeable observations about queer life. Memoir of a Snail, a stop-motion film about twin siblings coming of age in 1970s Australia, is up for Best Animated Film.

Produced, written, and directed by gay Australian filmmaker Adam Elliot, known for his “clayography” animation style that combines stop-motion techniques with biographical narratives, the win would be Elliot’s second Oscar, having taken home the statuette for Best Animated Short Film two decades ago for Harvie Krumpet, and the first for an animated film that directly addresses the challenges of religious and bureaucratic oppression faced by queer people and those around them.

Another gay man, producer Jeff Herrman, competes with Elliot for this year’s Best Animated Feature award, for his work on Dreamworks’ The Wild Robot. Notably, this is not the first year that two queer individuals have been in the running for the Best Animated Feature award. That occurred five years ago during the 2019-2020 season with nominations for Chris Butler and Dean DeBlois for Missing Link and How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.

One other category also features two queer nominees, albeit in contention with, rather than against, each other. In the running for Best Original Song for “Never Too Late” from the documentary of the same name, gay and lesbian icons Elton John and Brandi Carlile may lock out longtime contender Diane Warren with her sixteenth competitive nomination. While the nomination is John’s fifth and would be his third win, it is Carlile’s first.

Read Next

The Star-Power of Idina Menzel Can’t Save ‘Redwood’

Two other nominees round out this year’s gay grouping. Cynthia Erivo’s soaring portrayal of purported wicked witch Elphaba Thropp in Jon M. Chu’s mega-musical adaptation of Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked earned her a spot against Gascón in the Best Actress for a Leading Role category.

And Colman Domingo’s stirring performance of real-world John “Divine G” Whitfield, an incarcerated individual in a theatre group as part of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program in Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing, garnered him a nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role. Should Erivo, Domingo, or Gascón win, they could make history as the first person to accept an acting Oscar for a leading performance while being verifiably out in a public-facing capacity.

But nominations like these highlight one of the long-standing challenges of LGBTQ representation on the red carpet. For every closet door blown open by trailblazing queer artists, many others stay firmly shut. Although wins for Erivo or Domingo would be momentous, neither actor portrays a queer character this year, no matter how much #Gelphie femslash fiction fans write.

Heterosexuality proves a consistent challenge to queerness at the Oscars. In 1985, William Hurt became the first person to win for a leading role as an out gay character with a tour de force performance as an imprisoned and impassioned homosexual in the arthouse sensation Kiss of the Spider Woman.

Less than a decade later, Tom Hanks pulled off a similar feat as AIDS-stricken lawyer Andy Beckett fighting a wrongful termination suit in Jonathan Demme’s groundbreaking Philadelphia. But neither Hurt, who passed away in 2022, nor Hanks were or are gay.

Even in the last twenty-five years, as LGBTQ cultural acceptance appeared ascendant, straight men have accepted more nominations — and wins — for queer roles than have queer people, with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Sean Penn, and, most recently, Brendan Frasier, all accepting statuettes for going gay for pay.

Similarly, while the Academy may nominate queer women like Erivo, Kristen Stewart, and Lily Gladstone for their soul-stirring performances in both straight and gay roles, the body continually fails to recognize out and proud individuals.

Looking backwards, queer Oscars history is one with many LGBTQ people coming in first, but also a history that simultaneously feels like we’re coming in last. A queer woman, for example, holds the record as the Academy’s winningest performer of all time.

With four wins and twelve nominations, Katherine Hepburn won more acting Oscars than any other individual. But Hepburn’s sexuality has long been a source of contention, and so any serious consideration of her life and work must equivocate in some fashion, and Hepburn appears, then, like a soul with one foot in and one foot out of the closet.

LGBTQ Oscar nominees tend to do better behind the scenes. Between 1936 and 1957, MGM-based set designer and decorator Edwin B. Willis racked up eight wins and thirty-two nominations for films like the gothic thriller Gaslight and the Vincente Minnelli-helmed musical An American in Paris.

For that film, lesbian Irene Sharaff also won and took home one of her five total wins for Best Costume Design. The nominations and wins of people like Willis and Sharaff matter, but the lack of attention given to their categories, which have always been less showy, no matter how glamorous their work makes a movie, keep the contributions of LGBTQ individuals in Hollywood in the shadows.

Even the Oscars’ top prize exists in a kind of pall. While Barry Jenkins’ 2016 drama Moonlight beat the odds to win Best Picture against the juggernaut La La Land and became the first legitimately LGBTQ-oriented picture to win that award, many queer individuals still recall Brokeback Mountain‘s crushing loss to the inferior melodrama Crash a decade earlier.

And while queer cinephiles might claim the mantle of other Best Picture winners like Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, John Schlesigner’s Midnight Cowboy, or Alfred Hitchock’s dreamlike ghost story Rebecca, the reality remains that films like these employ queer characters and themes in perverse ways designed to titillate and thrill the straight and mainstream, rather than to make queer life and queer political struggles relevant to a wider audience.

The 2025 awards season continues the Oscars’ tendentious relationship with LGBTQ creators, characters, and stories. For all of the attention lavished on a film, for better or for worse, like Emilia Pérez, the Academy largely ignored deserving, popular, and complex queer films and filmmakers.

Queer and Challengers, both by gay Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, best known for stylish and sensual pictures like 2017’s Call Me By Your Name, explicitly visualized queer sexuality in steamy scenes.

Full of furtive glances and less-than-subtle depictions of same-sex desire — one can hardly forget the cheeky churros shared by Challengers‘ Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and best friend Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), or Patrick slapping Art’s protruding tumescence following a failed tryst with another object of their affection, the supple tennis star Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), all while the film’s throbbing score pulses in the background like a sweaty porno — both of Guadagnino’s films failed to pick up nominations.

Likewise, the Academy ignored smaller pictures like Jane Schoenbrun’s low-budget thriller and trans and non-binary allegory I Saw the TV Glow or Julio Torres’ surreal dramedy Problemista.

So what do we make of our queerness and the Oscars? Near the end of Memoir of a Snail, Pinky, a zany senior citizen who lives life on her own terms, reminds the film’s shelled-in protagonist Grace that “life isn’t about looking backwards, it’s about living forwards.”

Queerness in movies challenge normative notions about our shared world and history, gay and straight. At this dangerous moment for American politics and culture, each nomination and win still matters. The red carpet may not yet be a yellow brick road, but every queer moment on and off screen puts down another brick, and sets the path forwards for all of us together.

Paul Klein is a film historian and cultural critic. Follow him on Bluesky and Letterboxd @ptklein or read more at www.howtoreadmovies.com.

The 97th Annual Academy Awards will be held on Sunday, March 2, at 7 p.m., with a new starting time of 7 p.m. You can watch live on ABC or stream on Hulu. For more information, visit www.oscars.org/how-to-watch.