LOS ANGELES (AP) – This could be the year gay-themed films dominate Hollywood’s awards season.

The cowboys-in-love drama Brokeback Mountain, a potential Academy Award front-runner, led nominees in early January for film prizes from actors and directors unions, including performers Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams and Jake Gyllenhaal, as well as filmmaker Ang Lee.

Along with Ledger and Gyllenhaal, playing old sheepherding buddies who conceal a homosexual affair from their families, the Screen Actors Guild nominated Philip Seymour Hoffman for his role as gay author Truman Capote in Capote and Felicity Huffman for her gender-bending turn as a man preparing for sex-reassignment surgery in Transamerica.

Ang Lee, who directed Brokeback Mountain, and Bennett Miller, who made Capote, earned nominations for best filmmaker from the Directors Guild of America.

Brokeback Mountain, which also earned a leading seven nominations for the upcoming Golden Globes, has proved a box-office hit so far in limited release and might emerge as a best-picture favorite for the Oscars.

The best-actor Oscar could end up a two-man race between Ledger and Hoffman, while Huffman’s dazzling performance could bring her the best-actress prize to go with her Emmy last fall for “Desperate Housewives.”

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose 5,800 voting members choose Oscar winners, has yet to give its top prize to a film dealing as explicitly with homosexual themes as Brokeback Mountain.

Movies with gay angles have earned acting Oscars for such performers as Tom Hanks for Philadelphia and Hilary Swank for Boys Don’t Cry, but those movies did not break into the best-picture pack. Kiss of the Spider Woman won an Oscar for William Hurt as a gay man and earned a best-picture nomination, losing to Out of Africa, and best-picture winners American Beauty and Midnight Cowboy had homosexual subtexts.

SAG awards will be presented Jan. 29 in a ceremony televised on TNT and TBS. The Directors Guild will present its awards Jan. 28.

Academy Awards nominations come out Jan. 31, with the Oscars presented on March 5.