An Oscar Winner’s Very, Very Complex Legacy

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An Oscar Winner’s Very, Very Complex Legacy

There was so, so much drama leading up to the 1986 Oscars. Steven Spielberg had been snubbed in best director—again!—even though his adaptation of The Color Purple earned 11 nominations (it won zero). Cher was snubbed for a best-actress nomination for Peter Bogdanovich’s Mask, and got her revenge by showing up at the awards in a Bob Mackie headdress that has become an icon of Oscar red-carpet excess. (As she quipped onstage when presenting best supporting actor, “As you can see, I did receive my Academy booklet on how to dress like a serious actress.”) Leading up to the ceremony, Geraldine Page, the eventual best-actress winner, said this of attending the awards for her eighth nomination: “I love the Oscars. All sorts of tacky people win. And watching everyone run up and down those aisles is just adorable.” 

But it was one of the quietest speeches that wound up having the most impact, one that we’re still feeling at the Oscars today. William Hurt, then 36 and in the midst of a run that would make him one of the definitive actors of the ’80s, won best actor for his role in Kiss of the Spider Woman as Molina, a gay man imprisoned by the Brazilian secret police. His speech was “mercifully” short, as Rex Reed sniped, compared to some of his more long-winded interviews that season. But his victory started what has become something of an Oscar template: Straight actors (Tom Hanks, Hilary Swank, Mahershala Ali, Rami Malek, among others) play queer characters and win awards, while openly queer actors remain glaringly absent. 

For various reasons, including rights disputes that have made it difficult to see, Kiss of the Spider Woman has been fairly under-discussed as both a vanguard of indie films at the Oscars and the beginning of this hotly debated Oscar tradition. But on this week’s episode of Little Gold Men we are bringing it back into the spotlight, discussing the film’s challenges—the Nazi propaganda movie within a movie, Hurt’s often understated performance—and its rewards, particularly the onscreen dynamic between Hurt and his exceptional costar Raul Julia. As with so many other films in Oscar’s limited queer history, it’s a complicated legacy, but one well worth revisiting.

A Groundbreaking Queer Oscar Winner and Its Very, Very Complicated Legacy

In 1986 William Hurt became the first actor to win an Oscar for playing an openly queer character. Did he start one of the Oscars’ worst trends?

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