Queering the Oscars: The Delicious Costumes of "The Talented Mr. Ripley"

Team Experience has been looking at LGBTQ+ related Oscar nominations. Tonight we're serving lewks!

By Christopher James

For a movie with iconic nude scenes, the costumes of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) are just as memorable and titillating. It’s fitting that the Oscars honored the incredible work of costume designers Ann Roth and Gary Jones for the film, which should’ve shown up in more categories than the five it was nominated for. Though the actual Oscar went to Lindy Hemming’s period-specific and gloriously gaudy work in Topsy-Turvy, we’re still cheering on the sidelines for Ripley.

Let's count down the 10 queerest looks from the movie...

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Queering the Oscars: "Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt" for Best Documentary Feature

Team Experience has been looking at LGBTQ+ related Oscar nominations. 

by Nick Taylor

Over the course of June, one of my big cinematic missions was to watch as many queer documentaries as I could. A broader understanding and recognition of lived queer experiences, either through art or lived interaction, is something I’m finding increasingly valuable and incredibly grateful for. Past or present lives, always reflecting so many potential futures - cherish that shit! Cinema allows for a unique view on long-gone lives I would never have met. A lot of my dive has been focused on the Criterion Channel’s various LGBTQ+ playlists. If you haven’t already seen Dressed in Blue, Tongues Untied, and Shakedown, watch them all now and learn from their authors, the multitude of voices in front of and behind the camera bravely willing to show us who they are and what they know. 

Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, was also a recent discovery, equally inspired by this series and by its renewed spotlight on Criterion. To those who want to see it but don’t have this particular streaming service, it is also free on YouTube). The film is one of two Oscar-winning documentaries directed by Rob Epstein in Criterion’s playlist, each representing worlds of grassroots activism on behalf of a queer America grappling with very different realities from each other. The Times of Harvey Milk is as committed to being a joyous celebration of solidarity and advancement as well as a hollowing eulogy for everything violently, permissibly stolen from queer America as Common Threads is, with its own fierce editing and poignant, unabashed political agenda...

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Queering the Oscars: Best Foreign Film 1999, "All About My Mother"

For Pride Month, Team Experience has been looking at LGBTQ+ related Oscar nominations. We've decided to extend the series for a few more episodes. Pretend it's still June for a bit!

by Eric Blume

It’s wonderful fun to revisit 1999’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner, director Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother.  Although it’s a beautifully textured, multi-layered tapestry of themes and emotions, it has to be one of the unusual films to ever win this big prize. The plot involves, among other thing: a nurse going onstage as an unrehearsed cover for Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire; a HIV-positive, pregnant nun; two heterosexual women united by giving birth to sons named Esteban from the same transgender woman; and numerous conversations and jokes about acquired tits.

That none of these unlikely and uncommercial plot strands feel forced or shocking is due to the artistry of Almodóvar. The Spanish auteur weaves stories together nobody else would think of in a million years, wrapped up in the boldest color palettes imaginable, with performances of sheer emotional force that rattle the roof...

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Queering the Oscars: The Costumes of "Orlando"

by Cláudio Alves

Sandy Powell's career has been closely tied to queer artistry since its genesis. After completing her education, the costume designer soon started collaborating with multi-hyphenated gay icon Lindsay Kemp whose stage work she had long admired, and, later, her jump from theater to film would be predicated on another queer genius, Derek Jarman. They'd work on four projects – Caravaggio, The Last of England, Edward II, and Wittgenstein – and the costumer would continue, keeping his memory alive after the director's death in 1994. Since then, even as her profile grew into the mainstream, Powell remained faithful to the idea and ideals of queerness in cinema, often joining forces with artists under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, Todd Haynes most of all.

As Pride Month 2023 reaches its end, let's remember this Academy darlings' first brush with Oscar. It was in 1993 when Sally Potter's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando earned Sandy Powell a Best Costume Design nomination…

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Queering the Oscars: "Heavenly Creatures" for Best Original Screenplay

For Pride Month, Team Experience is looking at LGBTQ+ related Oscar nominations...

by Nick Taylor

Hello! Are you an enterprising young queer and/or MILF lover fresh off the newest season of Yellowjackets looking for another story of dangerous, imaginative, mentally unwell young women starring THE Melanie Lynskey? Would you like it to focus on an obsessive life-bond so intense it has almost no choice but to be queer? What if this one was based on a true story? Then have I got a film for you! Try your hand at Heavenly Creatures, the restaging of the infamous Parker-Hulme murder case in 1954 New Zealand about two pubescent girls so wrapped up in the fantasy world they’ve created over two years of isolating friendship that the only way the can imagine protecting each other from life’s unsustainable realities is to kill Mom.

Heavenly Creatures was directed by Peter Jackson, an inspired, imaginative artist whose soul would soon be held hostage by The Shire for decades. The film brought Jackson to international attention for the first time in his career, and netted an Original Screenplay nomination at the 1994 Oscars for himself and his writing/life partner Fran Walsh to boot. This is the sort of Screenplay nomination I deeply admire the Academy for making, even if I wish this pocket of support could have somehow translated to love for the direction, the actresses, the cinematography, and every technical element necessary to bringing Borovnia to life...

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