<p>An appropriately weighty question for a hot Friday afternoon:
If John Travolta gets an Oscar nomination for his performance as Edna Turnblad in Hairspray, would it be in the Best Supporting Actor or Best Supporting Actress category?</p>
<p>Actor. It’s for the performer not the part :)</p>
<p>Are you kidding? Actor.</p>
<p>Dustin Hoffman was nominated for Best Supporting…for Tootsie.</p>
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<p>And Felicity Huffman for Transamerica, where she played a transexual man who had not yet had is final operation.</p>
<p>Of course! I was confused because I haven’t seen many movies in which the opposite gender is played straight. In Tootsie, Hoffman played a man playing a woman. Transamerica was more complicated: Huffman (wow, Huffman, Hoffman) played a man but she looked like a woman . . .and then Boys Don’t Cry: Swank played a woman playing a man. </p>
<p>If you haven’t seen Hairspray yet, by all means go. It manages to be great fun yet is also has a serious story line.</p>
<p>I doubt very seriously he’ll be nominated - I thought he was the weak link to the movie, but I just don’t really have much respect for him as a person which biases me when I see him perform. But yea, best actor category.</p>
<p>Dustin Hoffman was more convincing in Tootsie, IMHO.</p>
<p>Teriwtt, I agree with Travolta being the weak link. We just saw the play on Broadway this month & I MUCH preferred the actor playing the mom. Travolta can’t sing & he’s a very weak actor, IMHO. His close set eyes and that oddly shapped fat makeup were just too cartoonish & too creepy for my taste. </p>
<p>The movie is quite entertaining. Lots of wonderful dancing & upbeat music. The Tracy & Seaweed characters were great, as were Christopher Walkin & Queen Latiffa & Michelle Pfifer. Corny Collins was perfect. That new heart throb playing Link – Zac something or other – is a really stiff actor. I guess I’m way past the demographic for appreciating him. I could have done without the Catholic dig, with the racist mom praying on a rosary & sprinkling holy water. Guess the producers/writers forgot about the priests who marched with MLK.</p>
<p>I think it’s worthwhile for our kids to see a slice of how denial of civil rights impacted everyday life. We see fire hoses and police dogs & violence when learning about the movement. Yet it was the everyday issues, like having to wait for a Negro Day to go to a dance, that all blacks constantly had to struggle with. I remember my mom telling me about Negro Days at the Jersey shore. For some reason, that resonated with me as a little kid more than many other injustices.</p>
<p>Julie Andrews was also nominated for Victor/Victoria a few years back as a woman playing a man pretending to be a woman - great movie!</p>
<p>Another example for the Oscars is Linda Hunt who won for playing a male dwarf in “The Year of Living Dangerously.”</p>
<p>And Linda Hunt won “Best Supporting Actress,” not “Actor.” Just to be clear.</p>
<p>There is no chance Travolta will be nominated for Best anything for his performance in Hairspray, other than perhaps Best Box Office Gimmick. Nice movie, but he was annoying throughout.</p>
<p>True cross-dressing roles seem pretty rare. Hoffman/Tootsie, Williams/Mrs. Doubtfire, Andrews/Victor/Victoria don’t count – each was playing someone of his or her gender who was cross-dressing in character. Huffman/Transamerica sort of counts, but not really. Nor does it count when Eddie Murphy plays ten cameos in his own movie, and two of them are women. Linda Hunt counts, and so does Travolta, and of course Divine in the original Hairspray. Who else?</p>
<p>The question is in which category would a post op trans-sexual be nominated?</p>
<p>Well, that’s easy. The nomination would be the physical sex after the operations.</p>
<p>The real question is which category a pre-op (or no-op) self-indentifying transgender person would be nominated in.</p>
<p>Okay, seriously people (Weskid and SuNa, take notes): Felicity Huffman played a transsexual WOMAN in Transamerica, not a transsexual man, regardless of what genitalia the character had. Hilary Swank played a transgender MAN in Boys Don’t Cry, not a “woman playing a man”.</p>
<p>You refer to someone by their post-transition identity. You use the pronouns someone prefers (not so applicable with fictional characters, but Brandon Teena was a real person who was murdered because of his gender, and people have the nerve to call him a “woman playing a man”?!). That’s the decent, polite thing to do… anything else just betrays ignorance.</p>
<p>Yes, good job pointing that out, Pseudonym. Thanks for the post.</p>
<p>By the way, I just realized that my last post wasn’t clear. I don’t mean the question is which gender the pre-op person should be nominated for–I’m all for using the gender the person indentifies with best. My question was which gender whoever runs the Oscars would actually use.</p>
<p>I was just kidding with my question. I vividly remember the Renee Richards case.</p>
<p>Pseudonym: Sorry I offended. I do realise that you should refer to a person as the pronoun they prefer (I go to Wesleyan, after all 
), and you’re right, I didn’t phrase that post right…I was just trying to be clear about what biological gender Felicity Huffman’s character was, but I should have been clearer.</p>
<p>Weskid, I realize you didn’t mean to offend, but referring to a trans woman as a man who hasn’t gotten “his final operation” is incredibly disrespectful, and it’s worse because you should have known better. I know a lot of the press for the movie referred to the character this way (I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stomach the movie itself, so I don’t know if its portrayal was any more accurate), but it’s still awful and only perpetuates lack of clarity when talking about trans people because it privileges the gender assigned at birth over preferred identification.</p>
<p>“Biological gender”? No such thing. The word you’re looking for is sex. Having a (okay, I can’t believe this stupid place censors a completely non-pejorative term for genitalia. Weewee, is that better?) doesn’t make someone less of a woman, and really isn’t relevant when you’re talking about the gender of a character.</p>
<p>Pseudonym: Once again, you’re right, and I’m sorry, and once again, I’ll try to be more conscientious in the future (it’s not like I don’t try, but clearly I haven’t de-internalized cultural norms/vocabulary as well as I would have hoped).</p>