LGBTQ+ actors Jodie Foster, Colman Domingo, Lily Gladstone just got Oscar nominations

Nominations for the 96th annual Academy Awards are in, including several nods for out performers and LGBTQ+ inclusive films.

Actors Zazie Beetz and Jack Quaid announced the 2024 Oscar nominees this morning live from Beverly Hills, California, with director Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster Oppenheimer raking in the most nominations, followed by Yorgos Lanthimos’s queer-inclusive Poor Things.

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Of the three out performers nominated in the acting categories, two scored nods for playing queer characters. Colman Domingo was nominated for Best Actor for his lead role in Rustin, out director George C. Wolfe’s biopic of gay civil rights icon Bayar Rustin.

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Meanwhile, two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster received her fifth Academy Award nomination for her performance in Nyad. Notably, Foster’s supporting role as out sports journalist and long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad’s best friend and coach Bonnie Stoll in the Netflix biopic is her first playing an openly queer character.

Killers of the Flower Moon breakout Lily Gladstone, who uses she/they pronouns, also received her first Oscar nomination for Best Actress for her role in director Martin Scorsese’s epic film, which also scored nominations for Best Director and Best Picture.

Alongside Killers of the Flower Moon, nominees for Best Picture also included Maestro, Best Actor nominee Bradley Cooper’s biopic of queer composer Leonard Bernstein, Poor Things, and Anatomy of a Fall, both of which featured queer heroines played by Best Actress nominees Emma Stone and Sandra Hüller, respectively.  

LGBTQ+ advocate Annette Bening also received her fifth Oscar Nomination for her lead role in Nyad. It’s her second Best Actress nod for playing a queer role, after being nominated for her performance in The Kids Are All Right in 2011.

Elsewhere, recently out pop star Billie Eilish received a Best Original Song nomination for “What Was I Made For?” from the Barbie soundtrack. And director Sheila Nevins’s debut film, The ABCs of Book Banning, which examines the impact of book bans in Florida that have primarily targeted works dealing with the Black and LGBTQ+ experience, was nominated for Best Documentary Short.