With the announcement of the Academy Awards nominees on January 22nd, Oscars season has officially begun. This year's prizewinner seems to be Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez with 13 nominations, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for Audiard, Best Actress for Karla Sofía Gascón, and the highly coveted Best Picture. A few months ago, these nominations wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows. The film was lavished with praise from critics after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May. But to many who watched the film afterward, the Academy seemed to be behind on the conversation surrounding it.
While it was initially well received by audiences, January brought forth a barrage of internet criticism towards the film. Negative audience opinion resulted in a decrease in the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, dropping from a typical 70% to a disappointing 39% between January 1st and 16th. This decrease was documented on similar sites such as Letterboxd, which saw the film’s average score decrease from 3 stars in late December to 2.6 by the time the Oscar nominations were announced. Searching the film’s title on Google auto-fills the word “controversy.” And it would be impossible to track the cumulative engagement received from social media posts critiquing the film, which seems endless.
An image, originally from Mean Girls, taken from @musicalesrandom on Instagram. The first image, in English, reads: “This award goes to abused women, trans women, and my Latino people.” The second image, in English, reads: “She doesn’t even live here.”
The internet is no stranger to hate campaigns against movies and TV shows. In 2022, the superhero-adjacent film Morbius became the subject of viral internet memes mocking the film’s critical and financial failures. To a smaller degree, HBO’s series The Idol was a popular online punching bag in the months after its release last year. What makes Emilia Pérez different from past internet “hate trains” is its critical response and, more notably, its subject matter.
Largely set in Mexico, the movie musical centers around a trans woman who begins the film pre-transition, leading a drug cartel. After undergoing gender-affirming surgery and faking her death, the eponymous Emilia Pérez attempts to reconnect with her family under the guise of a distant relative. The movie has garnered numerous controversies, relating to both its content and production, but all relate to its depictions of Mexico and its transgender lead.
On the production side, Audiard and Gascón have received the most condemnation. Many were quick to point out the problems with a white French man directing a movie about Mexico. The fact that the majority of the film was shot in Europe and not Mexico does not help his case. While promoting the film in Mexico City, Audiard claimed that members of the production team traveled to Mexico to do research, but interview footage has surfaced wherein Audiard claims he “didn’t study [Mexico] much.” Recently, Audiard has come under fire for describing Spanish as “the language of modest countries, of developing countries, of the poor and migrants.” Gascón received similar backlash both for being a Spanish woman playing a Mexican character and for resurfaced tweets that among other derogatory comments, likened the 2021 Academy Awards ceremony to an “Afro-Korean festival.”
Watching the film bored me more than it offended me. Musicals are not my thing and neither are family dramas. I felt the film especially dragged in the second act and could have easily been cut down. But despite my distaste for the film, there are still things to enjoy. Removed from political context and personal taste, Emilia Pérez is an undeniably well-made film. I believe the musical numbers are catchy with animated staging and choreography. The first act is succinct, and despite the film slowing down in the middle, all songs relate to the plot. It avoids the mistakes of past Oscar-nominated musicals such as Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables, which tried to make musical numbers feel more natural and grounded. Emilia Pérez, by contrast, fully embraces the theatrical nature of musicals. Characters address the camera, and time stops. Scenes in otherwise ordinary locations transform into elaborate set pieces. The film culminates in an action-packed, fittingly dramatic finale. As a piece of filmmaking, the movie fulfills all the qualifications you would expect for a Best Picture nominee.
But Emilia Pérez is not just an example of high-quality filmmaking. It is a depiction of transgender and Mexican individuals in a time when it is dangerous to be so, at least in the United States. It is inevitably a film and political statement wrapped in one. Can one deem the movie well-made without considering its representation of politically charged subject matter? More importantly, does it represent that subject matter faithfully and with respect?
The Mexican and transgender communities have overwhelmingly responded to both questions with an emphatic “no.” Transgender filmmaker Drew Burnett Gregory took to the LGBTQ news site Autostraddle to call the film “cis nonsense.” Both Gregory and the Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) criticized the film specifically for its depiction of gender-affirming surgery. In one scene in which Emilia wakes up in a hospital, she appears to have undergone facial, top, and bottom surgery all at once despite these procedures usually being performed separately. Mexican screenwriter Héctor Guillén described the film as “racist, Eurocentric mockery.” Guillén was also involved in creating a short film by Mexican transgender filmmaker Camilia Aurora, titled Johanne Sacreblu, which mocks Emilia Pérez for its primarily non-Mexican cast through its portrayal of French stereotypes by Mexican actors.
As a member of neither community, it's not my place to say whether or not Emilia Pérez properly represents them. That being said, individuals identifying themselves as Mexican or transgender have spoken out in the film’s defense, and I found that a lot of the online criticism seemed unnecessarily harsh.
For example, Emilia Pérez is hardly the first piece of media to cast a non-Mexican actor in a Mexican role. Several Mexican-American “Breaking Bad” characters, including Nacho Varga and Hector Salamanca, were played by actors with no Hispanic heritage. The voice actor playing Miguel, the protagonist of Pixar’s Coco, is Guatemalan. Considering this, I feel there is a disproportionate amount of critique of Emilia Pérez for its lack of Mexican actors while other pieces of media seemingly get a pass. As for its transgender representation, even Gregory admits in her article that Emilia Pérez is not uniquely bad in that respect. She simply thinks the film is boring because it follows many tropes that are associated with transgender characters in literature and media, which is a criticism I can understand.
But where was the unanimous display of bitterness towards Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book, or even Killers of the Flower Moon? Where was the internet outcry over these Best Picture nominees, with either questionable representation or questionable actors at the helm? There was backlash, certainly, but not on the scale seen with Emilia Pérez. In my personal opinion, this film is nothing special when it comes to inauthentic representation. But it is special in that it has a majority female cast and stars a transgender woman, especially during a time when transgender rights are being contested. It is also the first film starring a transgender actress to be nominated for Best Picture, and Gascón is the fourth openly transgender woman in the profession to be nominated for any Oscar at all. Furthermore, she is the first transgender nominee for the highly acclaimed Best Actress award.
And even if Emilia Pérez had perfect representation—if every criticism directed towards the film were fixed—the internet would still find things to dislike about it.
I hope that I’m wrong. The Oscars is one of the most popular award shows in cinema, and that doesn’t seem to be changing any time soon. In light of this, criticism directed toward the Oscars and nominees chosen by the Academy should be normalized. Regardless of my defense for the film, I’m glad Gascón has been removed from Netflix’s Oscar campaign. I’m equally glad that the Academy is straying from its traditional format to avoid including praise for Gascón during the broadcast. In light of her past comments, that’s a good thing. In the future, nominees exhibiting inappropriate behavior should face similar consequences. But only time will tell if Emilia Pérez is the exception and not the rule.