Recently in Academy Awards Category

Academy Award winner Cynthia Wade at the 19th Annual GLAAD Media Awards in New York City.

The ally's Oscar-winning documentary Freeheld is currently airing on Cinemax.

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) congratulates director-producer Cynthia Wade and producer Vanessa Roth on their Oscar® win for the short documentary, Freeheld. The award was presented this evening at the 80th Annual Academy Awards®, held at the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles.

Freeheld documents the 2006 struggle of New Jersey Detective Lt. Laurel Hester in her effort to transfer her pension to her domestic partner, Stacie Andree, in the months leading up to Hester's death. With less than six months to live as cancer spread to her brain, Hester battled the Ocean County Freeholders, the locally elected officials, to give to Stacie the security for her partner that married couples receive automatically. The film captures both the very public and urgent dispute with the Freeholders, as well as the couple’s intensely private struggle as they come to terms with Hester's terminal illness.

"Freeheld is such a poignant and powerful documentary, and we are proud to count Cynthia as a strong ally to the gay community," says GLAAD President Neil G. Giuliano. "We are so thankful the film – and Laurel Hester's memory – have been honored tonight with a prestigious and well-deserved Academy Award®."

As many burgeoning filmmakers know, figuring out how to distribute your finished product can be difficult, terrifying and/or frustrating. Queer Lounge hosted a strong panel today filled with experts from all areas of the spectrum, ready to answer the toughest of questions from the audience, many of whom were filmmakers and distributers themselves.

Just hours after receiving word that she had been nominated for an Oscar for her short doc Freeheld, director-producer Cynthia Wade joined me at the Queer Lounge in Park City for her first sit-down interview.

As GLAAD's Entertainment Media Director, I have been following the path of this film since seeing its premiere here at Sundance once year ago, encouraging everyone to see it who has the opportunity. The moving story of Laurel Hester has the capacity to change hearts and minds and, as you'll hear from Cynthia, is doing just that. With the Oscar nod, Freeheld is poised to reach an even larger audience during this election year with its important message.

As a married mother of two, Cynthia has gone above and beyond in taking a stand for LGBT equality and carrying on Laurel Hester's legacy. She is quickly becoming one of our strongest straight allies, and for that, we are extremely grateful.

Woke up this morning in Park City to the great news that the documentary short Freeheld, from Cynthia Wade and Vanessa Roth, has picked up an Oscar nomination in the Best Documentary Short Subject category. The film chronicles the final days of police detective Laurel Hester as she fights to transfer her pension benefits to her domestic partner before she dies. It was one year ago that Freeheld premiered here at Sundance (it won the festival's Special Jury Prize), and wherever it has been shown on its path to Oscar gold, it has moved audiences to tears. The filmmakers did an emotional interview of Hester speaking about the film, shot six weeks before her death.

Also nominated in the same Oscar category is a short doc that is currently showing here at Sundance: La Corona (The Crown), about a unique beauty pageant in a women's prison in Bogota.