America has the Oscars, Eurotrash have a Queer Lion

[Brother Temperance]

Well, the inevitable has happened: Godless Europe has begun openly rewarding people for promoting sodomy.

It has taken four years of delicate negotiations but yesterday it was announced that the Venice Film Festival is to create a new category for the best gay movie. Since all Eurotrash films are incredibly gay by definition, competition for the new prize is expected to be intense.
The decision to award the "Queer Lion", named in tribute to the festival's prestigious main honour, the Golden Lion, finally brings the Italians in line with other major cinematic events such as the Berlin Film Festival, which has been handing out a gay gong for 21 years.
To qualify, the film must, in the words of the organisers, "feature a gay theme or character". However, organisers threw open the running by widening the criteria so that the gay element need not be central to the film's main narrative. Between 10 and 12 of the entrants are expected to be considered in 2007.
In a perhaps unintended sideswipe at Brokeback Mountain, the 2005 adaptation of Annie Proulx's cowboy love tale which helped break Hollywood's apparently intractable taboo on homoerotic subject matter, competition director Daniel Casagrande said he was looking for realism.
"We aren't looking for the next Brokeback Mountain. We are just looking for films that accurately portray gay characters or themes," he said. Brokeback Mountain scooped three Oscars, including one for its director, Ang Lee, and dozens of other awards around the world.
This year's festival will open with a screening of Joe Wright's Atonement. British directors Peter Greenaway and Ken Loach will also be on show as will Ang Lee with Lust, Caution. As yet the movie world appeared unable to agree on who might qualify for inclusion in the Queer Lion shortlist, let alone who might win.
To mark it out from the Golden Lion, the Queer Lion will adapt the traditional winged beast logo with the addition of the rainbow colours of the gay pride flag.
The Berlin International Film Festival's gay film prize, the Teddy Award - an offshoot of its Golden Bear - has become an enduring feature of the international cinematic prize circuit. The first was given to Pedro Almodóvar for his film La ley del deseo, which featured Antonio Banderas. British director Derek Jarman has won it twice - in 1988 for his anti-Thatcherite epic The Last of England and again in 1993 for Wittgenstein, a dramatisation of the philosopher's life.
But judging what exactly constitutes a gay film was causing some controversy in San Francisco yesterday. Filmmaker Raymond Rea said his new project, The Sweet New, was rejected from this year's Frameline Film Festival after panelists reportedly declared it "not queer" because too many of the characters were heterosexual.
Rea now plans to stage Not Queer Enough at San Francisco State University's Coppola Theatre, where transsexual and bisexual writers and filmmakers will showcase work that examines "how the G and the L [gay and lesbian] respond to the B and the T [bisexual and transgender]", he told the San Francisco Bay Times.

And I thought the liberal Jew-run Oscars were bad. Only in Godless Sin Fransissyco could a film be rejected for not being queer enough.
And honestly, what sort of a depraved freak would actually be proud of winning a queer lion? Would their parents run around boasting about it to all their friends? The mind boggles.