Hollywood

The decline of retro-hetero chic

by Gerald Peary

As of last Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony, you could be forgiven for thinking Hollywood 2000 was all about retro-hetero chic. Who could have missed the dominant on-stage presence of those silver-haired members of the Playboy-era gang -- fiftysomething and sixtysomething hipsters all? James Coburn drooled over which pretty starlet he would name Best Supporting Actress. Cinematographer Conrad L. Hall, blithely politically incorrect, explained that his motivation for shooting American Beauty came with an epiphany that every older guy has the hots for 16-year-old girls.

There were the mostly incoherent mother-and-the-whore ramblings of Warren Beatty, jesting about his notorious once-a-bachelor conquests and then, embarrassingly maudlin, placing his much-pregnant wife, Annette Bening, on a public pedestal. Other old-time womanizers -- Michael Caine and Phil Collins -- also came in from the cold and, seemingly cured, used the Academy Award platform to go off on their doting wives and bountiful kids.

But there was something else brewing at the Oscars. The first sign that we've turned a cultural corner came with John Irving's refreshing antidote to this piling-on of born-again family values when he used his few seconds of air time to assert that The Cider House Rules supports "abortion rights." Even more subversive than Irving's utterance of the A-word, though was the clear ascendancy at the Oscars of a gay and lesbian sensibility.

You know we're post-post-Philadelphia when idiosyncratic gender-twisters such as Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother and Kimberly Peirce's Boys Don't Cry, both uncompromised projects by overtly homosexual writer-directors, win Academy Awards. Boys Don't Cry was co-produced by Killer Films, home base of the legendary lesbian indie producer Christine Vachon. It was financed and distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures, which includes among its key executives Lindsay Law, who is openly gay. The three partners of DreamWorks are Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and gay powermonger David Geffen. That's the mini-studio that made American Beauty, which, don't forget, combines a heterosexual male-fantasy principal story with a forceful anti-gay-bashing subplot.

American Beauty's Oscar-winning screenwriter, Alan Ball, is out of the closet. And without getting into speculation about the sexual orientation of the other American Beauty winners, let me just say that it was refreshing to hear all those mothers, fathers, sisters, and grandparents thanked, and not, for once, anyone's glorified opposite-sex spouse.

The final celebrants of the Oscars were American Beauty's two young producers, who gave quick speeches near the end of the ceremony -- the time we usually hear from some blowhard veteran executive (a cigar-puffer with five mistresses) sounding off sanctimoniously. Again, refreshing. And again, who knows for sure what their sexual thing is, but they're not so retro-hetero as to preclude speculation that they might swing differently from Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson.

In Hollywood 2000, the mantle has been passed.

Bonnie and Clyde? Try Bobby and Clyde.