It was a pretty good night for lesbian visibility at the Oscars this year. In addition to the big presence of Best Picture nominee The Kids Are All Right and its director Lisa Cholodenko, who was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay, we had Anne Hathaway celebrating what a great year it was for lesbians. "Not just in general," she said, "but in movies." The Kids Are All Right. "Lesbians!" she cheered. Black Swan. "Dancing lesbians!" Toy Story 3. "Where's the Dad?"
And we all noticed when Lora Hirschberg won the Oscar for Sound Mixing on Inception. "Who's that lesbian?" echoed across sapphist households nationwide. According to the Advocate, Hirschberg is indeed out and proud. Not her first time at the Academy Awards, either. She was nominated in 2009 for The Dark Knight.
I was rooting for Annette Bening for Best Actress. Despite the flaws of the film, I thought her portrayal of Nic in Kids/All Right was outstanding. But I'm not surprised Portman took the Oscar. If only Cholodenko had made the lesbian sex as hot as the straight sex, her film might have won something.
Interestingly, Cholodenko revealed her views on the subject of the straight/gay sexuality "continuum" in an interview in The New York Times Magazine last Sunday. In response to the interviewer's question about the ease with which Jules seemed to adapt to having sex with a man, Cholodenko replied: "I think my worldview is that everybody is on sort of a continuum. I respect people that are on either extreme, but my experience is that most people are not extremes. I think I always saw Nic as more of—if 10 is fully gay and 1 is fully straight, she might be a 7 and Jules might be more in the middle." When asked where she fell on the spectrum, Cholodenko dodged it: "I don't know. Can I get back to you on that?" Cholodenko also was asked if her film was autobiographical. "If you write something that's personal, there's going to be elements of yourself in it," she said, but detailed a few things about the film that are not true in her own life: She and her girlfriend (Wendy Melvoin of Prince's lesbo duo in the 1980s Wendy & Lisa) have one 5-year-old son, not teenagers, and she has not met the sperm donor. And, unlike the moms in her film, she is not wondering if her son is gay. Oddly, she said her son seems "superstraight." 
