Is Sam Smith naive, a bit clueless, or just eager to big himself up? His Oscars clanger that he might just have been the first openly gay man to win an Oscar removes any meaning from his shout-out to the LGBT community. (It’s a huge error, and one that should have been checked in advance.)
If Smith wants to claim a space in LGBT history, then he’d do well to actually know it. Smith wasn’t even the first openly gay man to win Best Song, never mind any other Oscar. Let’s hope he didn’t dare show up at Oscar-winner Elton John’s party.
So why does this matter? Being gay doesn’t automatically make Sam Smith an expert on LGBT history. Yet he seems eager to represent as a gay artist.
Perhaps a more meaningful shout-out would have been Anohni, formerly Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, who was nominated for the song Manta Ray, yet was not asked to perform at the event.
Anohni is the first transgender performer to receive a nomination but boycotted the Oscars, writing: “Last night, I tried to force myself to get on the plane to fly to LA for all the nominee events, but the feelings of embarrassment and anger knocked me back, and I couldn’t get on the plane. I imagined how it would feel for me to sit among all those Hollywood stars, some of the brave ones approaching me with sad faces and condolences.”
Smith’s shout-out feels vacuous when it’s shaped in an uninformed and self-congratulatory manner, whereas Anohni’s writing shows how members of that community are still sidelined from the largely white, male, rich pageantry the Oscars offers to art.
