[Pantyholic]

By CARYN JAMES
Published: November 20, 2005

GROUPS that hand out awards can be suckers for acting stunts, from Nicole Kidman's fake nose in "The Hours" to Adrien Brody's Adrien Brody's near-starvation for "The Pianist." The tradition is so entrenched that Kate Winslet , playing an outrageous comic version of herself in the HBO series "Extras," listed a surefire way to get that elusive Academy Award. "Daniel Day-Lewis" in 'My Left Foot?' Oscar. Dustin Hoffman , 'Rain Man?' Oscar," she says. "Seriously, you are guaranteed an Oscar if you play a mental." Irreverent, imprecise (the Day-Lewis character was not mentally troubled) yet essentially true.

This season she might have added: playing gay. There has been an explosion of Oscar-baiting performances in which straight actors play gay, transvestite or transgender characters. Philip Seymour Hoffman melts into the role of the gay title character in "Capote," while Cillian Murphy plays a transvestite in 1970's Ireland in Neil Jordan's witty, endearing "Breakfast on Pluto." Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger play lovers in "Brokeback Mountain" (set to open Dec. 9), already better known as "the gay cowboy movie" and already a Letterman joke.

But big-name actors are leaping into such roles in smaller films, too. Felicity Huffman stretches way beyond "Desperate Housewives" as a man about to become a woman in "Transamerica" (Dec. 2) and Peter Sarsgaard plays a gay Hollywood screenwriter who has an affair with a closeted, married studio executive (Campbell Scott) in the current "Dying Gaul."

It's this cluster of sexually different roles that is new, not the idea itself. These actors are simply following the Oscar-winning path set more than a decade ago by Tom Hanks as a gay man with AIDS in "Philadelphia," followed by Hilary Swank as the cross-dressing heroine of "Boys Don't Cry" and Charlize Theron, whose.................

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