GLAAD Nominees, Iceman, and Professor Marston
Saturday, January 20, 2018 at 1:48PM by Nathaniel R
This just in. The GLAAD nominations for portrayals of the LGBT community are out. This is a different group than the critics group that I vote with (the one from lgbt entertainment journalists) and their focus is less on quality -- or it has been in the past -- than on battling homophobia and fighting for inclusion. Their full name gives you their raison d'etre history: the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. They've made significant blunders in their years (supporting I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry would still rankle if anyone still remembered the film) but let's not hold that against them since we love that their purview is so wide (music, comic books, everything) and their purpose admirable.
The film nominees go like so...
OUTSTANDING FILM – WIDE RELEASE
Battle of the Sexes (Fox Searchlight)
Call Me by Your Name (SPC)
Lady Bird (A24)
Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (Annapurna)
The Shape of Water (Fox Searchlight)
OUTSTANDING FILM – LIMITED RELEASE
BPM (The Orchard)
A Fantastic Woman (Sony Pictures Classics)
God’s Own Country (Samuel Goldwyn Films/Orion Pictures)
Thelma (The Orchard)
The Wound (Kino Lorber)
Those are pretty great groups, don'cha think? Thrilled to see Professor Marston which is about a triad marriage between the creator of Wonder Woman and two free thinking queer women, get some recognition. It was roundly ignored in theaters but it's really quite involving and unique. And it's from an out female director of color Angela Robinson. (Dee Rees isn't the only one, people!) Robinson previously directed D.E.B.S. (2004) and Herbie Fully Loaded (2005) so this is a big step up. It would have been a huge step up had people really noticed the film. Perhaps on streaming, it's day will come?
Elsewhere GLAAD kind of goes overboard. They have, essentially, 25 nominees for best TV series (since there are 10 wide categories for both drama and comedy PLUS a regular sized limited series/movie category) and that is too many even in the days of "peak" TV. But I was happy to see that there were enough LGBT centric comic books for a whole top ten including Iceman (pictured above). He was always one of my favorite X-Men and when that video game where you could play X-Men fighting each other was popular I always played him so it's a fun coincidence that they've retconned him as a gay. Comic book companies are always retconning everything so there's no point in being an angry purist when one of the retcons does something progressive. Unfortunately Iceman only lasted a year on comic shelves, cancelled last month.
Reader Comments (6)
The bungled release and audience indifference to PROFESSOR MARSTEN AND THE WONDER WOMEN has been one of 2017's biggest cinematic sins. I hope readers catch up to it once it's available
PROFESSOR MARSTEN AND THE WONDER WOMEN they needed to come up with a more effective title
Wonder Women (my shorthand as Prof. Marsten seems to be others’) was on my must-see list, but it didn’t even *play* in D. (Neither did BPM, sadly.) Something tells me it’ll be on HBO.
Battle of the Sexes, while not *completely* ignored, still is quite underseen/underrated. It’s such a rousing crowd-pleaser that it’s failure at the box office I chalk up (at least partially) to Fox Searchlight’s decision not to go wide right off the bat. Oh, well, America, it’s your loss.
As far as I'm concerned, BPM is the movie of the year for me.
What Peggy Sue said. The fact that it won't make 100K at the box office is just very upsetting. And I have no clue why.
@Arkaan - because it barely played in any theaters and, when it did, barely stayed in some of them for longer than a week, maybe two. And with such small distribution, it's not going to get the marketing or even the reviews to get the word out.