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PORTSIDE CULTURE

EMILIA PÉREZ IS THE ULTIMATE UNLOVED OSCAR NOMINEE  
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Eileen Jones
February 5, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Despite Emilia Pérez’s mixed reviews and poor audience
reactions, Hollywood handed the musical 13 Oscar nominations in the
hopes of proving its progressive bona fides. Then old tweets from its
star surfaced. _

Karla Sofía Gascón stars in Emilia Pérez. , (Netflix)

 

If you’re paying attention to the movies, you’ve probably already
seen _Emilia Pérez_ or at least heard a lot about it. The
much-praised film is currently in the news because of the scandal
surrounding one of its stars, Karla Sofía Gascón, whose
controversial tweets from 2020–21 about Muslims, George Floyd, and
diversity at the Oscars have resurfaced. They’re generating such a
backlash that Gascón is being asked
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she plans to “renounce” her Academy Award nomination for Best
Actress in _Emilia Pérez. _

Here are the most inflammatory tweets
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question:

“I’m Sorry, Is it just my impression or is there more muslims in
Spain? Every time I go to pick up my daughter from school there are
more women with their hair covered and their skirts down to their
heels. Next year instead of English we’ll have to teach Arabic.”

“I am so sick of so much of this shit, of islam, of christianity, of
catholicism and of all the fucking beliefs of morons that violate
human rights.”

“I really think that very few people ever cared about George Floyd,
a drug addict swindler, but his death has served to once again
demonstrate that there are people who still consider black people to
be monkeys Without rights and consider policemen to be assassins. . .
. They’re all wrong.”

“More and more the #Oscars are looking like a ceremony for
independent and protest films, I didn’t know if I was watching an
Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M.
Apart from that, an ugly, ugly gala.”

“The Chinese vaccine, apart from the mandatory chip, comes with two
spring rolls, a cat that moves its hand, 2 plastic flowers, a pop-up
lantern, 3 telephone lines and one euro for your first controlled
purchase.”

Gascón has made tearful apologies in interviews while at the same
time denying that she is racist or in any way prejudiced, arguing that
her tweets are being misunderstood or taken out of context. She has
deactivated her X account and refuses to renounce her Oscar
nomination.

 

But even before this most recent scandal, there was no doubt that the
shine was increasingly off of _Emilia Pérez_. Mexican commentators
and trans film critics denounced the film’s stereotypical
representations in outraged terms. And there was an aesthetic backlash
as well, as latecomers watching _Emilia Pérez_ expressed amazement
on social media that the film was ever received as such a masterpiece
in the first place.

I share that amazement.

If you recall, after the film’s theatrical run, it had been playing
on Netflix with a lot of accompanying hype. It has already won many
high-profile awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globes.
And it’s been nominated for a whopping thirteen Academy Awards (as
many as _Oppenheimer _received), for Best Picture, Best
International Feature Film, Best Director for Jacques Audiard, Best
Actress for Karla Sofía Gascón, Best Supporting Actress for Zoe
Saldana, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film
Editing, Best Sound, Best Original Score, and Best Hair and Makeup.

Our question, admittedly an annual one, is: What is the Academy
thinking?

The film is a mess. Though it features a few compelling performances,
it’s an incoherent musical melodrama of vast and alienating
implausibility about a drug cartel boss (Gascón) who hires a jaded
lawyer (Zoe Saldana) to arrange his escape from his old life through
the process of gender transitioning. Once the former drug lord emerges
as Emilia Pérez and is living an authentic and redemptive life as a
woman, she and the lawyer help families uncover the fates of the
family members disappeared by the drug cartels, including those she
ordered “disappeared” in her old life as a man. Putting her new
identity even more at risk, she arranges a way to cohabit with her
former wife (Selena Gomez) and children, who don’t recognize her.

It’s a French production shot in France by arrogantly clueless
French writer-director Jacques Audiard, representing a painfully
stereotypical fantasy of Mexico and Mexican culture — the backlash
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that country has been particularly intense. In response, director
Audiard doubled down on his self-aggrandizing insensitivity with this
retort: “Did Shakespeare need to go all the way to Verona to write a
story about that place?”

 

Here’s a pat answer for Mr Audiard: It’s not 1595, and you’re
not Shakespeare.

_Emilia Pérez_ is equally reviled
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the trans community for its wrong-and-insulting-in-every-particular
imagining of the process of gender transitioning from male to
female.  Given the wholehearted embrace of _Emilia Pérez_ by the
insular filmmaking community, it may come as a surprise to learn that
adoration of the film doesn’t spread much further. According to
handy rating systems helpfully laid out by _Screen Rant_ here
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the critical reaction to _Emilia Pérez_ has been, to put it
politely, “mixed,” and the general public hates the film.

Of course, there have certainly been films that did badly with critics
and viewers upon initial release that were subsequently embraced as
masterpieces. The 1939 French film _The Rules of the Game,_ directed
by Jean Renoir, is one that immediately springs to mind. John
Carpenter’s _The Thing_ (1982) is another. Is _Emilia
Pérez_ another _The Rules of the Game _or_ The Thing_? Time will
tell. And it will tell us that the answer is no.

There’s a great deal of speculation
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whether this latest scandal will torpedo not only Gascón’s Oscar
chances but all the potential Oscars for _Emilia Pérez. _It depends
on whether the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences opt to defy the volatile criticisms and continue to embrace
the film. Of course, this representative body of the Hollywood film
industry skews liberal and votes Democrat as far as politics go and is
forever clumsily trying to present its progressive bona fides. The
awkward knee-jerk attempts at inclusivity have often been mortifying,
as critic David Opie of Yahoo notes when calling _Emilia Pérez_ a
“groundbreaking trainwreck.”

 

Stranger still is the embrace of _Emilia Pérez_ by so many talented
filmmakers. Guillermo del Toro has led the chorus singing the film’s
praises, followed by such noted directors as Denis Villeneuve, Michael
Mann, Paul Schrader, Nicole Holofcener, James Cameron, Jason Reitman,
Reinaldo Marcus Green, Oliver Stone, and Taylor Hackford. Surely that
should give us pause — top directors ought to be able to recognize a
fine film when they see one, right?

But when considering whether to trust the judgments of filmmaking
professionals, bear in mind how Academy Awards voting works.
Generally, established professionals nominate their fellow
professionals — actors cast the votes for actors, cinematographers
for cinematographers, editors for editors, and obviously, directors
for directors.

Yet how many times have you clutched your head in horror, or laughed
hysterically, when you see the list of this year’s nominees?

_Emilia Pérez_ once had a good chance of joining _Green Book_ in
the shamefully large category of Most Embarrassing Best Picture Awards
handed out by the Academy. But perhaps now that possibility is waning.

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Contributors

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of
the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

* LGBTQ
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* transgender equality
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* Emilia Pérez
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* NETFLIX
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