This week, the four major Hollywood trade guilds - the Screen Actors Guild, Writers Guild of America, Directors Guild of America and Producers Guild of America - announced nominees for their end-of-year awards. The guilds are often a better harbinger of Oscar success than critics' awards or the Golden Globes, because the guild members are also, by and large, Academy voters.

Only three movies made all four lists, and two of them feature gay characters: "Brokeback Mountain" and "Capote." (The third movie to get nominations from all four guilds is "Crash," which is quickly becoming the surprise contender in the Oscar race.)

Now, I have previously opined about how great these movies are - "Capote" was my No. 1 movie for 2005, and "Brokeback Mountain" was third.

(One reader looked over my Top 10 list ran last week and sent e-mails saying I was "deeply in touch with [my] feminine side" and "light in the loafers" and should recuse myself from reviewing gay-themed movies, as if critics should be as impartial as judges. Sorry, folks, but there is no such thing as an "unbiased critic," and my opinion is based on every facet of my personality, from my sexual orientation to my favorite baseball team - and, for those of you scoring at home, the answers to those two are "straight" and "the Seattle Mariners.")

It's a bit of a stretch to conjure up a zeitgeist phrase like "Year of the Gay" out of two prominent movies (though you might include Felicity Huffman's pre-op transsexual in "TransAmerica" or Cillian Murphy's Irish transvestite in "Breakfast on Pluto"). As anyone who ever saw Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's 1995 documentary "The Celluloid Closet" (or read the Vito Russo book on which it was based) can tell you, homosexuality in the movies is as old as the movies themselves. (One of Thomas Edison's first nickelodeon shorts had two guys dancing with each other, and Charlie Chaplin liked the occasional drag joke.)

But there must be some reason these movies, the story of two cowboys falling in love and the account of a gay writer's career peak, are striking chords today.

Part of it, I think, is that they are good stories well told. "Capote" tells of the struggles that author Truman Capote faced insinuating himself into a Kansas community to report on the murder case he covered in his "nonfiction novel," In Cold Blood. "Brokeback Mountain" is the classic tragic love story, of two people who are nothing without each other but are separated by what society prohibits - which, in this case, is an open relationship between two cowboys.

Also, these movies confront our shopworn stereotypes of homosexuality. There are no flaming finger-snappers, drag queens or limp-wristed hairdressers in these movies. (You have to go to "The Producers" for that.) And these stories aren't set in San Francisco or Greenwich Village or West Hollywood, but in America's heartland.

"Brokeback Mountain" features cowboys, as manly a symbol as we have in American culture, in a Western setting not usually associated with gay culture (though, as The New York Times' Frank Rich recently noted, Wyoming is the home state of Matthew Shepard and Mary Cheney). Meanwhile, Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Truman Capote, even with the lisping high voice and cocktail-party mannerisms, is a toughie who doggedly pursues the information he needs to finish his book. (My e-mail writer complained that I called Capote "slightly effeminate" - though compared with Huffman's character in "Trans-America" or Murphy's in "Breakfast on Pluto," Capote was butch.)

But I think the main reason "Brokeback Mountain" and "Capote" are resonating is because they are something new. For decades, Hollywood wasn't making movies with gay characters - and when it did, the characters were usually ineffectual wimps or psycho killers. Depicting gay people as people may just be an idea whose time has come.

Corrections: In my Dec. 25 column, about the movie people who died in 2005, I mistakenly omitted Noriyuki "Pat" Morita, Oscar-nominated for playing Mr. Miyagi in "The Karate Kid." I also misidentified Wendie Jo Sperber's character in "Back to the Future"; she, of course, played Marty McFly's annoyed sister.

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Check out my daily blog, "The Movie Cricket," at http://blogs.sltrib.com/movies. Send questions or comments to Sean P. Means, movie critic, The Salt Lake Tribune, 90 S. 400 West, Suite 700, Salt Lake City, UT 84101, or e-mail at movies@sltrib.com.