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I was going to write a piece entitled "Queering the Oscars" -- but then I watched them and realized that I wasn't up to the heavy lifting. My god, what a boring show. And such a shame, since Oscar Night has been a queer holiday for decades -- queens looked forward to since taking down the Christmas decorations at the end of January.

Most painful was all the unrealized queer potential.

Let's start with emcee Jon Stewart, who in that role couldn't do what he does best: be sardonic, ironic, and pointedly political. Stewart's cranky, sublime, perversely subversive sense of humor -- evident on his show -- was missing here. Instead, lame jokes about celebrities and "safe" political topics made for a very vanilla evening. I'm sure the Academy Awards programmers learned years ago with Chris Rock that hardly anyone watches the Oscars for "edge" -- viewers are, indeed, the apotheosis of middle-of-the-road. ("Edgy" on the Oscars means giving awards to African-Americans, or mentioning AIDS, or for queer performers to show up with same-sex dates.)

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Beyond the packaging, the Oscars were so straight this year because No Country For Old Men took home so many prizes: Best Picture, Best Directing, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor in a Supporting Role. No doubt the Coen brothers are talented -- Miller's Crossing and Fargo are great movies. But No Country For Old Men is routine, well-executed hack-work. The film is so obsessed with hetero male ideas of danger, honor, and adventure that it makes a truly junk thriller like The Bourne Ultimatum seem the height of indie filmmaking. No Country is so bad that it makes the endlessly talented Javier Bardem boring: sure, he has that weird wig and acts like he's in some cheap early 1960s William Castle thriller. But his dead-end performance makes as little sense as the rest of the plot. Giving this movie the bulk of the important awards was proof the Oscars have lost their nerve.

By contrast There Will Be Blood -- an adaptation of Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil! -- is a far better film, and its star Daniel Day-Lewis deserves the Best Actor award he won.

But what hurts is that the Oscars awards lineup signals rejection of two of the queerer entries in the Best Actor category. Johnny Depp's performance in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street was a calculated risk in a film that was nothing but. Depp is both totally right and totally wrong to play the psychotic, murderous tonsorial expert, but his is a performance of such nerve that it deserved an Oscar. His Sweeney Todd takes his Pirates of the Caribbean's Jack Sparrow those few steps that separate whimsy to willful wacko, and Depp brings himself to new levels of sustained craziness.

But Depp wasn't the queerest male performance last year -- that prize would go to Viggo Mortensen for his out-of-control role in David Cronenberg's slick, dazzling Eastern Promises. Mortensen appears as a Russian mafioso who has an extended nude knife-slashing, kick-boxing scene in a Turkish bathhouse in London. Mortensen, with no false cinematic modesty, had no problem exposing himself: in one scene, while he's bending over and leaping away from the killers, you can see, I think, his asshole. But the point is he performs here with such perverse conviction that it's impossible not to relish his... acting.

A little Depp'll do ya

But this carping on who won and who didn't is really just the tip of an iceberg of complaint. The bottom line here is that for the past five years, maybe a decade, the Oscars have been essentially a bore. The reasons are myriad. Celebrity culture has become boring. The likes of Drew Barrymore and Christina Ricci are merely pre-packaged, mainstream products. And celebrity glamour -- or any sort -- is all silly designer-made costumes that feel off-the rack.

But the main reason for the drabness -- and this strikes at the heart of why gay men have always loved Hollywood -- is that the films celebrated at the Academy Awards are mostly without heart and emotion. No Country For Old Men exemplifies. For all its technical brilliance and camera work, the film is soulless and tedious, even if the violence makes you jump. It's not that gay audiences don't want serious material -- they do. But they want above all films that challenge and perplex, startle and bedazzle. Under siege by TV and YouTube, Hollywood has taken to playing it safe. On Oscar night, that really hits home.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com