Gay Best Friend: Dolly Pelliker in "Silkwood" (1983)

 a series by Christopher James looking at the 'Gay Best Friend' trope 

This is a place for legends only.All roads lead to Cher.

Her second major drama role after Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean the year prior, Cher won accolades and an Oscar nomination for Silkwood. As Dolly Pelliker, Cher brought humanity, warmth and vulnerability to Mike Nichols’ whistleblower drama. On the surface, she reads as the template for the lovesick, sad lesbian lusting after her best friend. However, in stretching herself for the role, Cher brings added dimension to what could’ve been a thin side character...

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Almost There: Nathan Lane in "The Birdcage"

by Cláudio Alves

For as long as queer narratives have attracted prestige and awards buzz, straight actors have earned praise for playing LGBTQ+ characters. They're often complimented for being brave, risky, for putting their careers on the line in pursuit of some grand artistic merit. Even in 2020, once you move away from the festival circuit and regard more mainstream productions, it's hard to find actual queer actors portraying these roles. Ammonite and Supernova are just the latest examples of this trend. This isn't to say that cishet actors can't be great at playing queer roles, but we'd like some variety, especially in the context of Oscars.

Back in 1996, AMPAS had a good opportunity to honor a gay actor playing a gay role. Nathan Lane, who admittedly wasn't out yet, was in contention for a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his work in Mike Nichols' The Birdcage…

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And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson

by Cláudio Alves

Some days ago, as part of our 1981 coverage, we talked about Katharine Hepburn's famous Oscar record. She's the only actor to ever have won four statuettes, all of them in the Best Actress category. In that piece, the idea was put forward that, despite her amazing career, the actress wasn't deserving of most of those victories. She might have merited four Academy Awards, but not for those particular works. We didn't explore who should have won in the years Hepburn triumphed, mainly because there isn't a lot of consensus about the matter. Still, while that's true regarding the 1933, 1968 (a tie!) and 1981 Oscars, the same can't be said about the 1967 awards. In that Best Actress race, one performance has shined brighter than all others, gaining a legendary status that goes way beyond the Oscars. 

Since her movie is newly available to stream on Hulu, it seems like a good time to talk about Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate…

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Months of Meryl: Postcards from the Edge (1990)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

 

 #17 —Suzanne Vale, a recovering drug addict and B-list actress of royal Hollywood pedigree.

MATTHEW: It has always been impossible to escape the metatextual associations of Carrie Fisher’s Postcards from the Edge, which really means it has always been impossible to escape the shared history of two artists: Fisher and her famous mother, Debbie Reynolds, a relationship that is the very bedrock of Fisher’s 1987 novel and Mike Nichols’ subsequent screen adaptation. To watch the latter now, in a world without Fisher or Reynolds, is an experience of unavoidable and indescribable bittersweetness. It helps, however, that Fisher confronted even the most harrowing episodes of her lifelong addiction with a sly, battle-ready smirk and a tart tongue, which always ensured that she — and she alone — would get the last word. On the screen, Postcards from the Edge remains a salty, joyous, yet tough-minded immersion within the rocky recovery of its Fisher-like heroine, Suzanne Vale, and a prickly heartwarmer that continually confuses our inclinations towards laughter or tears.

This is largely because of Fisher, whose hysterical one-liners are an art form unto themselves. Consider, for a moment, that such gems as “Do you always talk in bumper stickers?” and “Instant gratification takes too long” and “What am I supposed to do, go to a halfway house for wayward SAG actors?” are all spoken within the first 20 minutes of the movie, and there are plenty more where those came from...

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Months of Meryl: Heartburn (1986)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

 

#13 — Rachel Samstad, a New York food writer who is seduced and betrayed by a tomcat D.C. columnist.

MATTHEW: The celebrated run of 80s-era films that cemented Meryl Streep as a master among screen actors is so overwhelmingly remembered for its cadre of self-sacrificing period heroines that it was only inevitable that Streep’s two comedic outings would recede into the background. Based on its critical reception alone, Streep’s 1989 Roseanne Barr match-up She-Devil, which we’ll get around to discussing soon, may very well deserve to be remembered as a curious career outlier — that is, if it deserves to be remembered at all. But what about Heartburn, the all-around more prestigious comic vehicle? The project marked Streep’s first reunion with her Silkwood director Mike Nichols and that film’s co-writer Nora Ephron, from whose thinly-veiled best-seller the film was adapted...

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