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There's a long-running joke in Hollywood that one of the easiest ways to earn an Oscar is to either 'Ugly it up" or contract a disease. But, in recent years, one of the newer trends that can lead an actor to the podium is for them to take on a role where they play a person of same-sex orientation (a fact that has already become the stuff of satire). Over the past 10 years, plenty of actors have earned Oscars for playing gay roles, and the latest actor to join the club could be Matt Damon, who has signed to play Liberace's lover in Steven Soderbergh's biopic of the flamboyant musician.

So what's the big deal? Don't actors pretend to be different people all the time ... isn't that their job? Well, yes, but it's a little more complicated than that. Gay and lesbian political advocates have long lamented the sad state of affairs where straight actors are getting gay roles, instead of giving 'out' actors their chance to shine. So, while I question the idea that only gay actors could play a gay character, just as only straight actors can play straight characters, the sad fact is that Hollywood is still relatively puritanical when it comes to allowing their actors and actresses to be out and proud -- and that needs to change. But, that doesn't mean I think an actor (gay or straight) shouldn't play role any role they want ... just as long as they're good at it.

So on that note, I decided to give a little credit to five performances by straight actors in gay roles that transcended orientation and, ultimately, are just damn fine performances.

After the jump: my picks for the best of straight actors going gay for pay...

There are many reasons to love The Proposition. It's written and scored by the irreplaceable Nick Cave. It's perfectly directed by John Hillcoat. It's both thrilling and strenuous on the heart. And above all else -- it's wonderfully cast, from the monologue-delivering John Hurt to the sadistic charm of Danny Huston's Arthur Burns.

While I appreciated Huston's work well before he headed for the dry grime of the Outback in the 1880s, his stint as the violent sociopath jettisoned him to a whole new level. What was so great about his performance is that while he maintained some of the exuberant charm he's known for, Huston used it as a way to balance the truly sadistic aspects of his character. Without a doubt, Arthur Burns is a dangerous man who does terrible things -- and Huston plays it perfectly -- but that little edge of charm gives the character more depth than is usually awarded to the character we're set up to hate.

Bomb squad. War zone. Malfunctioning robot. In the opening sequence of The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow expertly sets a tone of anxious, sweat-soaked drama. The film has been playing in New York and Los Angeles, expands to selected cities this Friday, and then goes wide on July 24. You can watch the first eight minutes online at Hulu (or after the jump).

And if that doesn't grab you, I don't know what will. I saw The Hurt Locker at SXSW, and that opening sequence pinned me to my seat. Guy Pearce leads a bomb squad that includes Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty. They're already suited up in protective gear as the scene begins, wisecracking and otherwise demonstrating an easy camaraderie. A small wheeled robot has a minor mechanical malfunction, requiring Pearce to walk into harm's way to fix it. The team's wary conversational bravado continues, even as they shift into high alert on the mostly empty street. Civilian bystanders could be friendly -- or they could be waiting to trigger the bomb.

Jeremy Renner, who turns up a little later in the picture, stars as a new member of the squad. He's a confident expert, but his reckless methods cause the others to question whether his devil-may-care attitude is needlesssly endangering their own lives. Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, and Evangeline Lilly also appear in small roles. I fully agree with James Rocchi, who wrote in his review: "You'll want to see it at a theater near you, in fact, on the largest possible screen with the best possible sound." Don't miss it.

Guy Pearce just doesn't do enough movies for my liking. It's not as though he's vanished, but he seems to maintain a fairly low profile every time he blows everyone away with a big, meaty part like L.A. Confidential or Memento. But he has a lot of great projects coming up (the most exciting of which has to be The Road), and he's added a very intriguing one to his slate: the remake of 1973's telepic Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Pearce and Bailee Madison have joined Katie Holmes in Troy Nixey's remake. It's a fairly loose adaptation of the 1973 original, which was centered around a couple, Sally and Alex, who inherited an old mansion from Sally's grandmother. Sally accidentally uncovers a hellish portal that allows a bunch of demons to escape and wreck bloody havoc. Naturally, no one believes her, and is convinced she's having a nervous breakdown thanks to all that home repair. Because it was the 1970s, it didn't even end well for Sally who just wanted a new fireplace. For those tired of seeing "remake" tacked onto everything, and for fans of the original, you'll be happy to know that the new Dark isn't so much a remake as a story "inspired by" those demonic creatures of old.

Check out the rest of the story at The Horror Squad

Based on journalist Mark Boal's real experiences following bomb disposal experts in Iraq, The Hurt Locker isn't just a welcome return to big-screen action from director Kathryn Bigelow (who has wrung both fame and infamy from her art with Near Dark, Strange Days and Point Break). It's an assured, confident, swaggering piece of moviemaking that manages to not only evoke every war of the 20th century but also, despite the claims by makers and some reviewers that it's an 'apolitical' film, speaks very specifically to the Iraq war. Even so, plunging us into the thick of things alongside the highly-trained men (and they're all men here) who defuse bombs for the Army, Bigelow and Boal avoid the speeches and postures and long, contemplative talks of home front films like Stop-Loss and In the Valley of Elah by staying in Iraq, and they shun the loopy, loony formal experiments of Brian De Palma's Redacted. Boal and Bigelow stay laser-focused on one group of men with a singular mission, and make us live in the constant possibility of death. Viewed from half a world away, a bomb is a political concern; viewed from less than a foot away, a bomb's just a high-stakes exercise in problem-solving, where making a mistake means a final, terminal education in the physics of expanding gases.

The Hurt Locker follows three soldiers -- bomb tech James (Jeremy Renner) and his subordinates Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldrige (Brian Geraghty) into the jaws of death; it's all last names in The Hurt Locker, as seen on patches and heard in urgent radio dispatches. Early on, Bigleow establishes that people will be killed in this film -- with a bravura sequence that depicts a bomb's detonation on the macro and micro level, billowing bursts of smoke and pressure and flame intercut with gravel and dust leaping choreographed in lockstep by the pressure wave, as if God had slammed his fist on reality hard to make a point -- and while Renner, Mackie and Geraghty are fine actors, they're also unknown enough to subconsciously let us know that they aren't safe from what may happen.

If you're like me, stuck at home, reading about all the great films playing in Toronto, and wondering, "When can I actually get to see the darn things?," I have some good news. Two "big buzz" titles have been acquired for distribution: Steven Soderbergh's Che, starring Benecio del Toro in the title role, has been nabbed by IFC Films (not Mark Cuban) for North America, and Summit Entertainment has secured US rights to Katheryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, featuring Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes.

IFC will release Che for a one-week awards qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles in December, according to an official statement received by Cinematical. It will then open in January via the company's "IFC in Theaters" platform, which means it will be available in select theaters and "on demand" through cable and satellite systems the same day. Ever since Che's world premiere at Cannes in May (where James Rocchi reviewed it), there has been speculation about how the film would be presented. Che is comprised of two stand alone parts -- The Argentine and Guerilla -- and the total running time is more than four hours. Now we know we'll some of us will be able to see the whole thing at one time. *

As with most any other genre, pitching a thriller seems to go that much more swimmingly once one finds an ideal blockbuster reference point with which to do half of the leg work. It's 'Die Hard meets this', 'Speed on a that', and, when in doubt, just say the damn thing is 'Hitchcockian'.

Post-2001, the likes of TV's '24' and 'Sleeper Cell', and film's Jason Bourne franchise, have tapped into both our political climate and pop culture zeitgeist, into a globe-trotting, gun-toting fear of the here and there and always now. Jeffrey Nachmanoff's Traitor feels like the first film that has itself been directly spawned in the wake of those successes, as opposed to merely being bolstered by it, and while it may overtake, say, Vantage Point in terms of plausible plotting and worldly knowledge, it remains a film that is good enough to grasp the bar and yet not quite enough to raise it.

Last year, bit by bit, we got casting notices for the uber-drama Winged Creatures, which collected a powerful group of actors -- Forest Whitaker, Kate Beckinsale, Jennifer Hudson, Dakota Fanning, Jackie Earle Haley, Guy Pearce, and Jeanne Tripplehorn. Now a trailer has finally hit the Internet, which you can see above.

As the trailer outlines, the film follows a group of people who suffer post-traumatic stress after a random shooting at a Los Angeles diner. Talk about a soul-sucker. The trailer alone should steal some of the wind from your happy sails, but it looks like it will be in the most worthy way. Initial buzz at IMDb has pegged the film to be a 9.1/10, so this could be one of those heavy, challenging dramas worth our time and energy. The film premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival, but a release date is yet to be set.

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for Death Defying Acts, starring Guy Pearce, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Saoirse Ronan and Timothy Spall. The film follows famed magician Harry Houdini (Pearce), who, while on a tour of Britain in 1926, enters into a passionate affair with a Scottish psychic (Zeta-Jones). Ah, but this psychic has plans of her own, and, along with her daughter (Ronan), attempt to con the magician by using the one event that's plagued him for many years: the death of his mother. Back when Death Defying Acts premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, our own Scott Weinberg said it was "lovely to look at and packed with some solid doses of charm and wit ... this is full-bore Hollywood fantasy all the way."

Death Defying Acts arrives in theaters in NY and LA on July 11.

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for Traitor (click to enlarge), starring Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce. Based on an idea from Steve Martin (who you usually don't see take on this sort of high-stakes drama), and a script from Jeffrey Nachmanoff (who also directed), Traitor finds Pearce playing a straight-edge FBI agent who heads an investigation on international conspiracy, where all clues lead back to former U.S. Special Operations officer, Samir Horn (Cheadle).

The first trailer for Traitor is now live over at Yahoo, and I have to say I'm really enjoying the film's fast-paced edge. Cheadle looks pretty badass in this, and I don't believe we've seen him this tough on screen in quite some time. Pearce (who's always reminded me of a more disturbed and intense Val Kilmer) is on his game as usual, so I expect good things from Traitor. I like a film that makes the audience work a little and think a little. You?

Traitor is set to hit theaters on August 27.