Films like Emilia Pérez and Will & Harper make for vastly different yet similarly unprecedented awards contenders

Strangely, improbably, as we move toward Oscar season, there are two trans films that are considered serious contenders for major awards – including one that could possibly even land best picture.

To say that this has never happened before is an understatement. The Oscars tend to be an extremely heteronormative affair – you have to go back to 2017 to see the last time Hollywood honored a queer-themed film for best picture with Moonlight, and looking back before that, the LGBTQ+ representation is very, very sparse. What you’ll find even less of is trans representation at the Oscars – the Academy awards had existed for 89 years before a single film platforming a trans story with a trans actor won any award at all (it was A Fantastic Woman in 2018, in which its star, Daniela Vega, helped it win best foreign language film) and there has been very little since.