Oscar = death? The heroes of Boys Don't Cry, Philadelphia, and Kiss of the Spider Woman won Oscars for their actors but were doomed by the final reel. Why is it that when it comes to queer characters ...

Oscar smiles on those who suffer. The Academy's 76 years of doling out nominations and gold statuettes is littered with examples of voters going gaga whenever actors harness an arsenal of tics, stammers, and other agonies to play the mentally challenged, physically challenged, addicted, up-against-it types, or combinations thereof. In the 1940s classic The Lost Weekend, Ray Milland copped the Best Actor trophy for battling booze and such alcohol-fueled hallucinations as a rubber bat on strings. More recently, My Left Foot was invigorated by Daniel Day-Lewis's heart-wrenching triumph over cerebral palsy through writing, painting, and seducing women.

Remember Dustin Hoffman upstaging Tom Cruise's toothy grin and Armani suits by working the autistic savant shtick in Rain Man Or how Sean Penn acted us senseless playing the lovably slow-witted hero in I Am Sam let alone the floridly bereaved father in Mystic River? Actors don't cop to it publicly, but they all know that trolling for Academy recognition demands they chew up some serious scenery in movies lop-heavy with that particular brand of strained seriousness that is considered a "credit" to the industry.

But when it comes to awarding the gold to actors playing gay and lesbian characters, Oscar history informs us that it isn't enough for a character to suffer in a bravura scene-grabbing style. He also must die. Watching William Hurt brilliantly swish, fantasize aloud about movies, become politicized, and lock lips with a macho political prisoner in Kiss of the Spider Woman, one could hear his Best Actor votes being tallied when his character lay beaten and dying. The message being that to curry Oscar favor, gay characters must pay for stealing scenes through martyrdom. More recently, Charlize Theron's out-of-nowhere brilliance in Monster demonstrates several rules of the Academy game. Oscar voters traditionally get moist whenever a dish lets her looks go, as witness Olivia de Havilland's nomination for The Snake Pit and the wins by Halle Berry in Monster's Ball, Susan Hayward in I Want to Live! and Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? among others. What's more, sexual outlaws must always get their comeuppance by the final reel. Take Hilary Swank grabbing the gold for playing Brandon Teena in Boys Don't Cry. Sure, Swank gave a killer performance in which she is shown hacking off her long hair, binding her breasts, shoving a dildo down her jeans, and strutting around like a studly redneck to wow Cloe Sevigny. But what cinched Swank's award was her transgendered character's paying for his cross-dressing role-playing by being brutalized, raped, and killed.

Similarly, Tom Hanks took home an Oscar as Philadelphia's lawyer, dying of AIDS while fighting employer and societal discrimination. As good as Hanks is, the movie was all Oscar-baiting con job. Giving Hanks the award let Academy members congratulate themselves for expressing political correctness, reward a fine actor for extreme dieting to look AIDS-ravaged, and sniffle over his death without ever once having to be grossed nut by watching him be intimate with his beloved life partner. Now, that's the kind of queer Oscar can snuggle up to.

It almost seems that if any gay character is to get Academy attention, he's got to pay for his sins. By these standards, small wonder that back in the '70s Peter Finch didn't have a prayer of winning an Oscar playing the physician in love with a bisexual lout in Sunday Bloody Sunday. Why? Because his character not only didn't die but also committed the cardinal sin of being successful, smart, and relatively happy. Although Ian McKellen won a nomination for Gods and Monsters for peerlessly playing dying gay film director James Whale, two things probably cost him a win--one being the movie's absence of a knockout death scene, the other being the actor's unapologetic outness. (Translation: He was just playing himself.)

The award-winning performances of Swank and Hanks stand on the shoulders of such old school Oscar-nominated queer characters as Dame Judith Anderson's housekeeper obsessed with the lost Rebecca (she suffers death by incineration in a fire) and Clifton Webb's superbly acidic newspaper columnist in Laura (gunned down by police). In fact, George Sanders, as All About Eve's velvety and venomous theater critic, remains the one actor to win an Oscar playing a gay character (albeit a veiled one) who survives past the final fade-out.

Someday, Hollywood may catch up with real-world reality and start presenting gay characters as fully rounded, complex, and not necessarily issue-oriented. Someday, Oscar may have the smarts to recognize the consummate skill of a performance like Rupert Everett's in My Best Friend's Wedding. And someday too, an actor will grab an Oscar playing an unforgettable character who just happens to be gay and isn't doomed. Until then, though, apparently when it comes to Oscar, the only good gay is a dead one.

Rebello also writes for Spin, Playboy, and Hollywood Life.