Emilia Pérez and the Oscars double blind

Of the many inevitables of Oscar season, one certainty is that the film or filmmakers perceived to be the front-runner will find themselves in a spot of difficulty before the awards ceremony. There is a legion of highly paid, aggressive publicists whose job is not only to promote their clients’ interests, but also to rubbish the competition. Granted, an Oscar is no longer the path to box-office success it once was — I’m not sure that anyone was rushing out to see CODA or Nomadland after their awards, not least because there was so little competition in the pandemic era — but it will add millions to an asking rate, instill lasting gravitas and ensure a movie’s lasting reputation.

Many people really, really want to win an Oscar. (See Bradley Cooper being castigated for his antics in support of the unsuccessful Maestro last year.) Even that great austere don of cinema, Christopher Nolan, unbent sufficiently to be filmed running around to the Benny Hill theme tune in the company of Stephen Colbert. Oscars duly followed. Yet this year, the front-runner, in the form of Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, will need rather more than a few comic skits to save its reputation. Despite being nominated for thirteen awards, it has become a punchline in its own right, and unless something changes unexpectedly over the next few weeks, the Academy is likely to shun it, or face existential ridicule.

On paper, Emilia Pérez is exactly the kind of movie that the new make-up of the Academy ought to be dying to honor: diverse casting, with a trans star and women of color in leading roles, and being both formally and aesthetically experimental and daring. Its tale of a Mexican cartel leader who changes sex in order to escape his old life seemed to embrace many of the new shibboleths of contemporary Hollywood, and the film industry’s apparent anointing of it as the most significant movie of 2024 represented the upholding of the left-wing, liberal tenets that modern-day cinema appears to convey.

There have, however, been severe problems. Firstly, although the film was initially very well received by critics, who pronounced it a masterpiece, it soon became clear that its views of trans life and Mexico alike were retrograde at best, and purely offensive at first. The picture was denounced as racist, transphobic and plain bad — it is a musical in which most of the cast cannot sing — and the fact that it was made by a French director, in France, who cannot speak Spanish (or English for that matter) has led to its being loathed in Mexico, where it has been virtually laughed off the screens. Its audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is low, and getting lower. This is not a popular film.

Its defenders, though, pointed to the glass-ceiling-breaking of its star Karla Sofiá Gascón being the first trans woman being nominated for an Oscar. This has been controversial enough on its own terms, but it has now transpired that Gascón has been active on social media, and not in a good way. They have been hauled over the coals for tweets criticizing everyone from George Floyd (“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”) to the Oscars themselves (“#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.”)

This has not helped the film’s chances, to put it mildly. Gascón has put out an apology — of sorts — in which they have stated “I have always fought for a more just society and for a world of freedom, peace and love. I will never support wars, religious extremism or the oppression of races and peoples.” It has not helped their cause that one of their now-deleted tweets called their Emilia Pérez co-star Selena Gomez a “rich rat,” which is going to create a certain degree of froideur on the red carpet. No wonder that another of their co-stars, Zoe Saldana, commented of their remarks that, “It makes me really sad because I don’t support [it], and I don’t have any tolerance for any negative rhetoric towards people of any group.”

It is impossible to know what will happen. It is possible that Gascón will attempt to withdraw from the ceremony, under considerable pressure from their co-stars and the filmmakers, but there is no question of their nomination being rescinded: bad behavior has never disqualified anyone, only technicalities about release dates and voting lobbying. Yet the whole miserable saga is a reminder that if a film appears to be a “woke” Oscar voter’s wet dream, it would be worth checking the small print first. Otherwise the results could sound a very wrong note indeed.