Despite outcries over the lack of diversity among this year’s (most years?) Oscar nominees, the esteemed voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have made at least one progressive move in their 2016 props.
Said esteemed voters recognized the well-deserved efforts of transgender musician Antony Hegarty in the category of Best Original Song.
Hegarty scripted the lyrics to the song “Manta Ray” for the documentary film Racing Extinction. For this achievement, Hegarty collaborated with Oscar-winner J. Ralph, who composed the song’s music. (J. Ralph also worked on the scores for “Man on Wire,” “The Cove,” “Chasing Ice,” “Finding Vivan Maier” and several other films that received nods from the Academy.) Racing Extinction presents a visual collage of artists and activists grappling with issues of endangered species and mass extinction.
“I always think about those stories about the last bird, or the last of a species, when they’re calling out and they don’t have the other animal, the partner that can call back to them,” Hogarty told the culture blog Flavorwire. “The idea of the disappearing voice is very resonant for me. What hears a solitary voice. What responds to a solitary voice.”
When she was about 10 years old, the British-born songwriter moved with her family to the San Francisco Bay area in the early ’80s. In the early ’90s, she moved to New York City to study at NYU and begin her cutting-edge musical career, starting by co-founding a performance art collective called Blacklips. She soon co-founded and took up the lead mic for the band Antony and the Johnsons, which has toured internationally and performed with many symphony orchestras across Europe. The group’s 2005 album, I Am a Bird, featured guest artists by Lou Reed, Boy George and Rufus Wainwright. The group released its fifth album, Hopelessness, in 2015.
Hegarty is the second trans person to be nominated for an Oscar. The first, a two-time nominee, is the late composer Angela Morley, who scripted the lyrics to Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerners’ music for The Little Prince (1974) and for the Sherman Brother’s Cinderella story, The Slipper and the Rose (1978).
