TONIGHT, the 91st Oscars ceremony will celebrate a small selection of films deemed worthy by the Hollywood elites who make up the membership of the Academy Awards. Typically, what that has looked like in practice has been a very narrow vision of art and the lives it represents, centring the narratives of white, straight men.

Only recently has this picture started – oh, so cautiously – to change, and this year in particular marks the “queerest” Oscars in history, with films such as Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite racking up nominations. Some might ask if this really matters; after all, they’re just films, and progress in this arena doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on equality for the average person, who will never star in or direct a film.

But seeing oneself reflected in stories and art is something humans have sought solace in throughout history, and it’s also an important part of how our individual and collective understanding of other people is developed.

For those of us whose identities and experiences have been chronically absent from mainstream culture, every scrap of representation can be a personal lifeline and a political opportunity to step out of the marginalised fringes and into a space which demands to be seen and heard.

My discovery that I liked girls, like most life-defining moments, happened gradually then all at once. At age 13 – fulfilling every terrifying vision of the pro-censorship, “think of the children” religious right – it was the sight of two women kissing in a music video that broke the dam. After a subconsciously scripted moment of protest – “ew, that’s weird” – my eyes lingered a little longer as the girls’ mouths met in frantic, stylised desperation, and I felt something unlock inside of me.

It wasn’t the first time I had felt it, but it was the first time I could name it: and as cheap and exploitative as that music video may have been, I have to credit it with allowing me to recognise that what I was feeling could make sense in the real world.

Throughout my teenage years, there were other, and thankfully (slightly) better, examples of representation which I turned to for comfort and answers to questions I was still asking myself. These fictional queer women facilitated important conversations in my own life – like when my friend told me she didn’t see why Marie Sweet freaked out so much when Kim told her she fancied her in Channel 4’s Sugar Rush, prompting me to come out to her before any of my other friends, or when, for some entirely unfathomable reason, I tried to watch The L Word with my mum. (I never noticed just how many sex scenes there were until that moment.) Later, despite some grumbling about whole new levels of cheesiness, I even watched Lip Service – the Glasgow-based BBC Three drama which revolved around a group of queer women – after it was recommended by strangers on social media on the other side of the world.

You can always count on the lesbians – no matter where they are – to tune in to anything and everything featuring queer women, even when it’s … just not that great.

In the world of film, my luck in finding stories about lesbian relationships which I actually enjoyed was more limited – finding films which anyone other than over-keen queer women trawling the internet had actually seen was rarer still.

Both of those shortcomings, of course, had the same root: films about queer women have typically struggled to gain the financing needed to create big budget – and, by extension, widely released – films. But is the tide turning?

Among the eight best picture nominees this year, there are five with either central or peripheral LGBT characters: The Favourite, Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book, Vice and A Star Is Born.

And among the acting nominations there are seven for LGBT characters: Olivia Colman, Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz for The Favourite, Rami Malek for Bohemian Rhapsody, Mahershala Ali for Green Book and Melissa McCarthy and Richard E Grant for Can You Ever Forgive Me?

An Oscar nod for an LGBT role is not, in itself, such a rarity; what makes this collection of films more special is that they offer a relatable and multidimensional group of characters.

For queer women in particular, this is a big year. While 2015, 2017 and 2018 brought nominations and ultimately Oscar wins for The Imitation Game, Moonlight and Call Me By Your Name – all centred around gay male characters – films about lesbians have remained behind the curve in achieving such accolades.

In 2015, Carol, a love story between two women set in 1950s New York, based on lesbian author Patricia Highsmith’s groundbreaking novel The Price Of Salt, promised to change this with its A-list cast and critical acclaim.

Carol received six Oscar nominations, including one for screenwriter Phyllis Nagy, an out gay woman herself, but it missed out on a Best Picture nod and ultimately left empty-handed.

NOW The Favourite has taken up the mantel, making history before the awards are even announced by gaining 10 nominations, the most for any film centred around lesbian characters to date, and tying with Cabaret for the most nominations for any LGBT-themed film.

Using creative licence in telling the story of a manipulative love triangle between Queen Anne and women in her court, The Favourite has been tipped to walk away with several awards, meaning it could be the first film focussed on a lesbian relationship to ever win an Oscar.

Of course, the relationships depicted in the film are in many ways toxic, driven by deceit and a thirst for power – not necessarily the groundbreaking representation that queer women need in 2019 – but there is a palpable complexity to these women and their motivations, and a sense of genuine connection between Anne and Sarah, in a period when gender, sexuality and class were immovable barriers.

This is a story worth telling, but a story which should be one of many which queer people, young and old, can look to for fictional expressions of their own realities. Within that, the need for diverse narratives about diverse lives – including trans people and queer people, queer women of colour – remains a question hanging in the air, yet to be answered by the mainstream film industry.

It is important to note that, although the Academy Awards has been praised for recognising more LGBT films this year, Jeff Whitty, co-writer of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, is the only out LGBT nominee across the writing, directing or acting categories. And, of the 20 people nominated for Original and Adapted Screenplay, only two are women, while not a single film directed by a woman has been nominated in the Best Director or Best Picture categories.

Meanwhile, The Miseducation Of Cameron Post – a beautiful and surprisingly hopeful film about a teen girl’s experience of a gay conversion camp in the 90s – was written and directed by queer women and awarded the prestigious grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival last year, but failed to receive an Oscar nomination, and even suffered a nervous waiting period before being picked up by a distributor at all.

The stories being held up as the most valuable, the most deserving of acclaim and – vitally – financial investment, are still overwhelmingly stories told by men, and straight, cis men at that. In many ways, the consumption of fiction is an exercise in empathy; at its best it is a journey into a world not quite your own, where you can learn something about yourself that perhaps you never knew. If we want to see a world where such empathy extends beyond the narrow vision of a privileged few, equality in cultural output is a necessity. We may just be on the road there, but there is a long way to go.