By JJ Ledewitz, Arts & Culture Editor
The Golden Globes’ Best Musical or Comedy category was stacked this year. Of course, it included Wicked – the film everyone thought would win – as well as some others that were fantastic in their own right, like The Substance, and Jesse Eisenberg’s tearjerker, A Real Pain. But the one that won, a film nobody thought could, would, or should win was a little film called Emilia Pérez.
Emilia Pérez is a (technically) Spanish-language French musical crime film that was released in 2024. You probably have never heard of this film. Most people had never heard of it before it was nominated for almost every Academy award possible – a feat that becomes more and more surprising (and suspicious) as the Oscars inch closer.
Out of the 23 Oscar categories, feature-length, non-documentary live-action films are technically eligible to be nominated for 17. Emilia Pérez received thirteen nominations. Thirteen.
This would be okay if it was on the same level as some other films that have received record-breaking Oscar nominations, like Titanic or Lord of the Rings (fourteen nominations and eleven, respectively). But, it isn’t. In fact, it’s one of the worst films of 2024, not just in terms of quality but because of its essence and what it represents. Which makes this entire ordeal absolutely baffling to anyone with a pair of eyes and two hours and ten minutes to spare.
I hadn’t heard about this film until I saw the enormous level of hostility levied towards it online after it won many awards at various film festivals. I felt bad for the director and those behind the film; if it won all those awards, it couldn’t be that bad, right?
Right??!!
So I watched it.
It is that bad.
Emilia Pérez follows a lawyer (Zoe Saldaña) who helps a Mexican cartel leader (Karla Sofía Gascón) undergo a gender transition and escape her troubled past.
I went into this film with an open mind, but it closed up pretty quickly because everything about the film was objectively bad. The actors performed like they had never spoken to each other before; the cinematography was odd; the songs caused pacing issues, which made the entire film feel like one long, boring, bizarre train wreck. It lacked just about everything a film should tolerably provide.
Worst of all were the musical numbers horrendously piled on top of everything. Calling them “songs” would be a generous term. They were bits of offbeat and abnormal lines of dialogue taped to the sounds of several musical instruments, making it clear that nobody who worked on this film knew anything about making a musical. The dance sequences frequenting the songs were downright laughable, cementing this entire mess as less of a film and more of a never-ending, catastrophic nightmare – one that was incredibly boring yet also painful to watch.
Looking at reviews of Emilia Pérez, I didn’t see one casual moviegoer who liked the film. However, people didn’t just hate it because it was terrible; they also hated it because it was offensive to just about every minority group represented on screen.
According to reports, French director Jacquez Audiard claimed he “didn’t need to study much” about Mexico because he “already knew what he had to understand.” He also said he doesn’t speak Spanish, and that none of the actors in the film are Mexican-born. Also, the film wasn’t shot in Mexico. All of these choices by the director culminated in a film filled with and reliant on Mexican stereotypes. A mariachi band and an entire song listing off what the local families can’t afford as our introduction to the country and its culture? It’s blatant racism.
Offending an entire country is one thing, but Audiard wasn’t finished with his offensive crusade. The film’s transgender representation was also considered atrocious. Just like with its Mexican representation, everything was boiled down to stereotypes. As one critic pointed out, “The film [hit] just about every trans trope you can imagine: trans woman killer, tragic trans woman, trans woman abandons her wife and children to transition, transition treated as a death, deadnaming and misgendering at pivotal moments, and trans woman described as half male/half female.” The film brings up a very important topic and then absolutely butchers it in the most offensive way possible.
Audiard had a chance to tell two unique stories in one film. He failed at both, but somehow Emilia Pérez has gone on to become one of the most nominated films in Oscars history, receiving nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing, Best International Feature and more. This film does not deserve any of these awards. Not only is this film bad and offensive, but it dared to center around important topics while fueling the discrimination it should have aimed to stop.
So, why is Emilia Pérez getting all these awards?
Films like American Fiction, Killers of the Flower Moon and Barbie show that the Academy loves giving awards to films that tell important and unique stories based around social issues or underrepresented groups. But the Academy’s treatment of Emilia Pérez proves that it is more obsessed with the mere idea of representation than actual representation.
It seems that Audiard thought he could profit off of serious topics without really caring about them – and he was right. They say you can’t put lipstick on a pig and expect it to be beautiful, but apparently you can succeed in ensnaring every film festival and award ceremony. It’s like these award-givers are looking at the surface of the film and clapping for it like they do for any groundbreaking masterpiece, calling it beautiful while the rational viewers around them desperately shout, “Look! It’s a pig with lipstick!” They are blind to the obviously offensive pandering that has infiltrated their ceremonies, eating away at their credibility. If these award-givers want to go back to giving awards to films that deserve them, things must change.
I will be watching the Oscars this year, not because I find it enjoyable, but because I want to see how many awards Emilia Pérez wins, how many times the Academy will give attention and praise to something so universally abhorrent. I want to see the speeches given by those who made this film, to see what their priorities are and if they will break character and acknowledge that they just received an award for 130 minutes of hate and racism. I want to see the crowd of celebrities clap and cheer if awards are given to the antithesis of what film should be. And, by the end, I want to tally up the numbers and see how morally corrupt the ceremony truly is.
Obviously, I can’t say what a film should be, but I can tell you what it should not be.
It should not be Emilia Pérez.
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