In the ninety years since the Pulitzers first gave a prize for the year's best drama, the judges have chosen to give no award fifteen times, including 1997 and 2006. So last night at the first of their four-part 19th Annual Media Awards, why didn't GLAAD take a dignified pass in the category honoring major motion pictures? Instead, they proclaimed the summer flop Stardust to be the year's Outstanding Film in Wide Release. GLAAD knew it was a terrible year for lgbt characters in studio movies; they could only find three films to nominate instead of their usual five. The others were Across the Universe and The Jane Austen Book Club, which actually had a sweet lesbian subplot and should have won. It sounds like Stardust's gay content was limited to Robert DeNiro as a pirate who belowdecks dresses as "a cancan-dancing, boa-twirling Folies-Bergère chorus girl prancing before a mirror." Here's a roundup of what critics said of his performance:
The New York Times: an excruciating embarrassment
The Boston Globe: DeNiro makes a macho-hammy-swishy mess of himself... He's terrible, but he's having, well, a gay old time.
New York magazine: I gazed on Robert De Niro—under the direction of Madonna’s husband’s
best man—as a closeted pirate captain prancing to the “Can-Can” in a
tutu. I haven’t checked the Rapture Index, but surely this is a cosmic
convergence. The end might well be nigh....As that capering pirate, De Niro is god-awful
The Washington Post: Robert De Niro's turn as a cross-dressing
pirate, isn't nearly as successful...[he] camps it up -- think less a riff
on Keith Richards and more "La Cage Aux Folles" -- in a performance
that can only be described as deranged.
The Chicago Tribune: The scene depicting De Niro's closeted pirate mincing around to
Offenbach's famous "Orpheus" cancan goes on as well, and it makes you
wonder if some things simply weren't meant to be.
Philadelphia Inquirer: a painfully prancing performance from Robert De Niro as a crossdressing pirate
New York Post: Prancing a can-can in petticoats as a swishy swashbuckler who makes
Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow look positively macho, De Niro
embarrasses himself at the helm of a floating pirate ship. Worse, his star turn threatens to swamp the entire movie.
The Village Voice: ...and when Stardust does devolve into comedy, it fails miserably.
Robert De Niro shows up halfway through as a closeted, cross-dressing
captain of a high-flying pirate ship, and he's an utter distraction—a
reminder that, hey, this is just a silly movie about silly things
starring famous people acting all silly.
TV Guide:
The film stumbles painfully when it tries to be funny: Robert De Niro's
star turn as the notorious pirate Captain Shakespeare, a mincing,
closeted cross-dresser who thinks — mistakenly — that he looks pretty
in pink, is cringe-inducing.
The Hollywood Reporter: In a tedious sequence, Robert De Niro hams it up as pirate captain
aboard an airborne "lightning" ship. The captain, macho in front of his
crew, has a secret predilection for wearing petticoats and dancing the
cancan in his private quarters. Straining for camp, his scenes are just
plain embarrassing.
As for GLAAD's own criteria for its awards, the first on their list is:
Fair, Accurate and Inclusive Representations – Rather than portraying
the LGBT community in broad stereotypes, the project deals with the
characters or themes in a fair, accurate, and multi-dimensional
manner.
Aside from the obvious problems, honoring a movie like Stardust diminishes the integrity of the other awards, many of which were well deserved for important work. 60 Minutes won for its report on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and David France won the magazine award for his article "Dying to Come Out: The War on Gays in Iraq" published by GQ. Jane Gross won the newspaper journalism category for her piece "Aging and Gay, and Facing Prejudice in Twilight," published in the New York Times, which also won Outstanding Newspaper Overall Coverage. AlterElton.com won for a piece called "Gay Newsmen: A Clearer Picture," and Anderson Cooper won for a CNN segment called "The First Casualty," but he was unable to come out in person to accept his award. A full list of winners in the twenty-six categories announced last night can be read here. The remaining fourteen categories will be announced at dinners in South Florida (April 12), Los Angeles (April 26), and San Francisco (May 10).
UPDATE: Commenters, whom I appreciate, disagree with my take on Stardust. My point remains that DeNiro's performance--whether or not it gets laughs--doesn't sound as if it has anything meaningful to say about queer lives. And it appears to contradict GLAAD's goals: How is it not a "broad stereotype?" What about it is "multi-dimensional?" How does it truly illuminate the lgbt experience for a mainstream audience, which is the purpose of this award. To the charge that I've taken reviews out of context, I think it's clear that Holden's final verdict is "excruciating embarrassment." To see the full quote, with the performance compared to a squawking kazoo solo in a Mozart string quartet, seems to support my view, which is not lessened by Holden's acknowledging that he gets the in joke of DeNiro riffing on Depp's pirate. Providing context is also why I've linked to every review in full. Of course, even criticism, like comedy, can be open to interpretation. It would be terrible if we all agreed all the time. Thanks for the discussion.