Emilia Pérez’s Oscar nomination haul is regression masquerading as progress
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Netflix’s musical crime drama has broken new ground when it comes to representation at the Oscars. But while this year’s nominations look meaningful at a glance, there’s more than a hint of empty gesturing, writes Clarisse Loughrey. At first glance, this year’s Oscar nominations have a weight to them. They feel notable, important – worthy, even. At the heart of this is Jacques Audiard’s musical crime drama Emilia Pérez, which set a new record for the most nominations for an international film. (It got 13 nods – surpassing previous record holders Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Roma (2018), who both earned 10.) It’s a Spanish-language film, set largely in Mexico, with a trans character at its centre, played by trans actor Karla Sofía Gascón. Without seeing Emilia Pérez, you’d probably assume that its Oscars nomination coup was a daring and progressive choice by the Academy. The reality is sadly the opposite.
Long before its Oscars ascendancy, Emilia Pérez won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, soaring off the back of a fair amount of critical praise. This was, we were told, a “a powerful, unfiltered portrait of someone who challenges several stereotypes at once” and “sincere, sentimental filmmaking”. Yet this adulatory, initial wave of reviews was penned largely by cisgender critics. Audiard himself is cisgender. And the more trans and queer critics began to publish their thoughts, the clearer it became that there was a profound disconnect here. Emilia Pérez suffers so profoundly from a lack of cohesion – musical, thematic, and narrative – that it is impossible to gain much of anything from it. For it to be championed so fervently by the Oscars is merely the performance of something new, something radical, but is ultimately superficial in what it stands for. It’s stasis masquerading as change.
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