Oscar First: Drag Race Star Kelly Mantle Official Eligible in BOTH Supporting Acting Oscar Categories

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Kelly Mantle, a former contender on RuPaul’s Drag Race, has been approved for consideration to be nominated as both Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress, a first for the Academy. Now, don’t go crazy with your Oscar predictions just yet. The likelihood of this nomination is pretty infinitesimal but it doesn’t take away from the historic element of the submission approval.

Mantle’s film, Confessions of a Womanizer, premiered at 30 film festivals, earning 14 awards. It opened in the US theatrically in October of this year. It stars C. Thomas Howell, Gary Busey and Andrew Lawrence.

Via Facebook, writer and director Miguel Ali had this to say:

[box type=”shadow” align=”” class=”” width=””]“To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time in Oscar history that a person will be considered for an acting Oscar in both gender categories. I firmly believe that our androgynous/transgendered acting community is the most untapped resource in Hollywood. We need to bring them more attention, and by doing so, we will create more empathy for our androgynous/transgendered brothers and sisters.”[/box]

Check out Mantle’s Oscar submission here:

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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