In 1978 gay director and former choreographer Herbert Ross – he had been married to ballerina Nora Kaye and then Lee Radziwill but people in Hollywood knew he was gay – surprised everyone by filling two of the five Best Film of 1977 Oscar slots with the newly married Neil Simon/Marsha Mason lovefest “The Goodbye Girl” and the Arthur Laurents-penned ballet soap “The Turning Point”. Both had gay moments, and both were dreadful. Yet, between the two of them, they garnered an incredible 16 Oscar nominations (” The Turning Point” eleven and “The Goodbye Girl” five), with Ross himself getting a nod for Best Director for “The Turning Point”.
“The Goodbye Girl” left the ceremony with one Oscar – Best Actor for Richard Dreyfuss. To gay people, like me, this was insulting. In a Neil Simon world, filled with throwaway dykes and fags, Dreyfuss plays an aspiring actor whose big break comes when he is cast in the leading role in Shakespeare’s Richard III (the hunchback who lost the War of the Roses and put the Princes in the Tower). Unfortunately, his director (Paul Benedict) is a raving, mincing queen who insists that Dreyfus play the part like Bette Midler. Alright, this may seem momentarily funny, but did Simon stop to think for a second that gay people spend their entire lives trying to fit-in in a straight world? And reversing this process for a few laughs without a hint of irony seems callous and uncaring.
By the early 1980s, it had become clear that Marsha Mason’s four Oscar nominations in the Best Actress category were an egregious error, and that the Mason-Simon relationship was the most nauseating example of nepotism in Hollywood since Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg.
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Seventy Queer Films Made Under the Hays Code (1934-1967)
https://thebrownees.net/seventy-queer-films-of-the-new-hollywood-1967-1981
