Is Kristen Stewart about to become the first openly LGBTQ actor to ever win an Oscar?

Queeries is a weekly column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens.

Awards season is — come hell or high Omicron — in the midst of staging a comeback. After last year's wild, largely Zoomed attempt at pulling off the festivities despite all of the things (which was mostly painful to witness but occasionally bore very interesting results), a return to relative normalcy is definitely the aim for the next four months.

Kicking off officially earlier this week with Monday's Gotham Award ceremony and announcements from several critics award groups, the parade will keep on coming all the way to its March 27th, 2022 finale: the 94th annual Oscars. (You may scoff at the ridiculousness of this immensely excessive timeline, but I for one am desperately ready for a 121-day-long distraction from society's implosion.)

Someone already at the centre of this season — and almost certain to continue to be up until its final moments — is Kristen Stewart. The 31-year-old has been considered a frontrunner for many a best actress prize since her spellbinding performance as Diana, Princess of Wales in Spencer debuted at film festivals this past August, and that has in no way slowed down. Just this past week, she was honoured at the Gotham Awards (delivering a very endearing speech) and then nominated for a Hollywood Film Critics Association award. There's obviously a long way to go, but it would be pretty shocking at this point if Stewart doesn't go on to receive her first Oscar nomination for Spencer. And perhaps even more shocking is that if she wins (which she currently is heavily favoured to do), Kristen Stewart will become the first openly LGBTQ winner of not just a best actress Oscar, but any acting Oscar whatsoever.

Before you start researching your certainty that I am wrong in suggesting this fact, let me clarify that by "openly" I mean the actor would need to be publicly, proudly LGBTQ at the time they won their Oscar. This was not the case with the two most obvious examples of winners who were closeted or semi-closeted at that time, Jodie Foster and Kevin Spacey, nor was it for many other winners we officially found out were queer long after their wins. In fact, only two out actors have ever even been nominated: Ian McKellen and Jaye Davidson. Which is all the more wild when you consider 14 straight actors have won Oscars for playing LGBTQ roles. The only scenario (and it's an increasingly likely one) in which Stewart winning an Oscar does not make her the first out LGBTQ actor to do so is if openly queer West Side Story actress Ariana DeBose wins a best supporting actress trophy earlier on the same night. 

Kristen Stewart came out publicly in 2017, and announced her engagement to screenwriter Dylan Meyer just last month. The idea of watching her kiss her same-sex fiancé before accepting a history-making Oscar is a pretty thrilling prospect for the many, many queers who watch the awards religiously every year (myself obviously included). And better yet, it will come incredibly deserved. Stewart's performance in Spencer is my favourite of the year: bold and masterful, leaning perfectly into the paranoiac melodrama of director Pablo Larraín's occasionally bonkers vision. Her voice and mannerisms are exceptionally Diana-like, transcending impersonation to offer us a truly complex portrait of a woman trapped by her fame and circumstance. 

Stewart obviously knows a thing or two herself about the trappings of fame (which gives Spencer a whole other layer), but she ultimately navigated it all rather remarkably. When she finished the Twilight film series that made her one of the most famous people in the world, she seemed to quickly adopt a zero-fucks approach to that fame. Instead of continuing to act in projects that might achieve the kind of mainstream success of Twilight, she veered toward films that challenged our perception of her, likely challenging herself in the process (see: Olivier Assayas's Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper, Kelly Reichardt's Certain Woman, Walter Salles's On The Road and Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland's Still Alice). And instead of hiding her sexuality like so much of Hollywood sadly continues to do, she became arguably the most famous actress to ever come out at the height of said fame. She even proved last year with Happiest Season that a studio-produced holiday romantic comedy centred on a same-sex couple and starring an out actress could be a huge hit.

This is not an easy trajectory to pull off, but pull it off Stewart did. And in the process, she helped normalize the idea of the queer movie star, opening that giant closet door of Hollywood so that others can feel safe to follow. If this award season does indeed lead to a finale where she and/or Ariana DeBose become our first out and proud Oscar acting winner(s), it won't just make history — it'll push that door more open than it's ever been before. 

Spencer is now playing in theatres across the country.