The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominations for the Oscars last week. Year after year, this process elevates the status of some films, while attracting controversy over the snubs. We have heard these arguments before: The #OscarsSoWhite campaign in 2015 highlighted the lack of diversity in the Academy and the award-winning films, which had been overwhelmingly White for too long. Only three women — Kathryn Bigelow, Chloe Zhao and Jane Campion — have won an Oscar for Best Direction. And the films themselves do not make the cut purely on merit, but after relentless campaigning by studios.
The Academy has revealed its genre bias in the past — favouring “serious” subjects like biopics and historical dramas over blockbusters. For a time, Oscar-winning women actors were those who had stripped themselves of all glamour, partaken in some nudity, or (needlessly) suffered on screen, in what the Academy has been accused of seeing as vulnerability. Women simply cannot be happy onscreen and win an Oscar, perhaps.
This is where this year’s top billing comes in. At 13 nominations, Emilia Perez (2024), joined the ranks of Titanic (1998), La La Land (2016) and Oppenheimer (2023). Unfortunately, this may be the most egregious film to be elevated to what is traditionally regarded as grounds for cult status.
Emilia Perez is a Spanish-language film set in Mexico with a relatively simple premise: The head of a drug cartel fakes her death and undergoes gender transition surgery so she can live her best life. The titular character is played by Karla Sofia Gascón, a Spanish actress based in Mexico. Hollywood stars Zoe Saldana, who has Dominican and Puerto Rican parents, and Selena Gomez, a proud Texan with a Mexican parent, provide star-powered support. The film is directed by Frenchman Jacques Audiard and while set in Mexico, was mostly made in France.
Following its debut at Cannes last year, Netflix acquired the film for around $12 million and shopped it to the awards circuit. Streaming services are still seen with some degree of contempt here, with CODA (2021) distributed by Apple TV+ becoming only the first film to win the Best Picture Oscar.
Let’s start with what Emilia Perez did get right: It cast a transgender actress as a trans person and in the lead role. This is but the second time in the Academy’s history — Chilean film, A Fantastic Woman (2017) starring Daniela Vega did this first, winning the Best International Feature Oscar in 2018.
In the past, Hilary Swank won the Best Actress Oscar for her moving portrayal of Brandon Teena, a trans man for Boys Don’t Cry, while Jared Leto won the Best Supporting Actor award for playing Rayon, a trans woman in Dallas Buyers Club (2013). While their performances were compelling, the films themselves unwittingly furthered a narrative of biological essentialism in gender by casting cisgender people — those who identify with their assigned gender at birth — as trans persons in these roles.
However, Emilia Perez falls prey to several stereotypes cis people harbour about the trans experience, a failing that the film reveals at several points, including in a musical sequence that features Saldaña dancing around a room full of gender-affirming surgeons who cry out “Vaginoplasty! Penoplasty!” In an essay for The Cut, Harron Walker argues that the film toys with the titular character’s idea of femininity without fully engaging in its complexity. She writes, “She is a woman trapped in the body of a man, then a woman in denial of the man she still harbors within. There’s a cruelty to this portrayal of a trans woman, as if the filmmaker blames her for failing to accept herself for all that he believes her to be.”
At a fraught time for gender rights, this film does unfortunately count as a breadcrumb of progress in a rising wave of conservatism worldwide. The returning American president did not skip a beat in stripping the country of many of its protections for transgender citizens in his first week back. The fallout will unfold over the coming years. Emilia Perez’s nomination could be seen as a signal by the Academy, which harbours delusions of liberal grandeur, that they do not intend to cower yet to this new administration’s demands.
That no Mexican names appear in the top credits of the film is a red flag, but one that could have mattered less if the film made the effort to walk the extra mile. Indie darling All We Imagine As Light (2024) centres on Malayali nurses in Mumbai. The film was made in Malayalam, despite its director Payal Kapadia not being a speaker of the language herself. In an interview with The Indian Express, she explained that she had been inspired by the real-life stories of Malayali nurses, and benefited from a collaborative process that helped her rework the dialogues to make it realistic.
Clearly, Emilia Perez did no such thing, and at best, made minor accommodations for its lead actresses. Zoe Saldaña’s Rita Castro is thus a Dominican person who went to school in Mexico. Jessi, the mob boss’s wife was written as a Mexican character on the page, but Gomez who plays the part is not a fluent speaker of Spanish. Thus Jessi on-screen is Mexican-American, switches between clunky Spanish and American English on a whim, and has a sister based in the US.
Then there are the stereotypes about Mexico. Yellow filter aside, the film gives its titular character a ridiculous redemption arc — from a feared mob boss, Perez transforms into a social activist who tries to reunite families with those they lost to the drug war. The film devotes little time to understanding this change of heart in an individual with a violent past, apart from the suggestion, as per one of the songs, that “changing the body changes the soul”.
This brings us to the music: Emilia Perez is a musical, and has been nominated for Best Original Score and Best Original Song. However, the songs in the film do little to further the narrative and in fact, interrupt its pacing. Contrast this with fellow nominee Wicked (2024). An adaptation of a Broadway play with award-winning songs like “Defying Gravity”, Wicked has an advantage over Emilia Perez in how it uses music in service of the story. But Wicked is the superior film in other ways too, including its understanding of the politics in an imaginary land. It is better made, better produced, immersive, compelling, and quite importantly, believable.
There are no excuses for what is objectively a bad film that does a gross disservice to its subjects — trivialising the conversation on transgender identities to a few tired talking points, and not advancing the representation of its Mexican characters further. At the end of the day, why are we making films in the 21st century that fall back on tired tropes? This cannot be reduced to people crying “woke” either — detractors tend to ignore the very simple fact that films are for everybody and everyone deserves a chance to be represented as authentically as possible.
anagha.jayakumar@expressindia.com
