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How ‘Emilia Pérez’ used industry love to overcome online backlash and surge to the front of the Oscars Best Picture race

When Emilia Pérez stars Karla Sofia Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz won a shared Best Actress prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, jury president Greta Gerwig said it was the film’s theme of sisterhood that she wanted to celebrate. “Women together — that’s something we wanted to honor when we made this award,” Gerwig said. “Each of them is a standout, but together [they’re] transcendent.”

Little did anyone know at the time, but Gerwig was the first prominent Hollywood name to lavish praise on Jacques Audiard’s genre-breaking musical about a drug cartel leader who undergoes gender-confirmation surgery so that she can live as her authentic self. In the eight months since the Cannes debut, as Netflix has moved Emilia Pérez through the fall festival gauntlet and into position as one of the year’s top Oscar contenders, several top industry figures and international voting groups have expressed their love for the project. Meanwhile, in online circles, controversy about the film continues unabated.

The disconnect between those important voting blocs and social media users was shown in stark relief on Sunday night as Emilia Pérez won four awards at the Golden Globes, including Best Comedy/Musical, all while commenters and critics gnashed their teeth in outrage. Ahead, how Emilia Pérez has overcome the backlash en route to its status as a top Oscars contender.

The Industry Loves It

James Cameron doesn’t suffer fools and isn’t afraid to speak his mind. So when the erstwhile King of the World told The Big Picture podcast that Emilia Pérez “blew me away,” it felt notable. “I’ve seen it three times,” Cameron said. “It’s not like any other film that’s ever been made. It’s bold, it’s daring. It’s a vision. It’s beautifully executed. It’s a beautiful piece of filmmaking.” The Avatar filmmaker is perhaps a bit biased — after all, he’s worked with Saldaña for years — but his words didn’t feel like half-hearted niceties. 

Cameron is one of the several filmmakers who have spoken highly about Audiard’s film. Fellow Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro praised Audiard and his work during a special event at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles last October. “I just want to say that very often, we come to these places, to theaters, hoping to see film. And I think we’re very, very fortunate that we saw film tonight,” he said. 

Among filmmakers who cited Emilia Peréz as one of their favorites of the year when asked recently by Indiewire are Paul Schrader, Nicole Holofcener, and Reinaldo Marcus Green. Writing for Vulture, John Waters expressed his admiration. “This wildly original musical-drama about the Mexican drug syndicate and its trans crime boss hiding in plain sight proves you can sing about anything in a film if it’s well-enough directed,” Waters wrote. Oscar contender Denis Villeneuve is a fan, too. “I thought that it was very original and inspiring. Jacques Audiard’s movies always give me a boost of energy, he’s one of our best filmmakers,” the Dune: Part Two auteur said.

And that’s just the filmmakers. Meryl Streep came to bat for Gomez, her Only Murders in the Building costar. “It was beautiful. It was just a beautiful, smudged, sensual, incredible performance,” Streep said of Gomez. Emily Blunt was blown away by the film as well.  I just couldn’t believe what I was watching. And you can’t call it a musical… it’s a completely singular experience,” she said.

International voters are smitten

While U.S. critics have all but ignored Emilia Pérez this season — opting instead to reward films like Anora, The Brutalist, and Nicked Boys — international voters have done no such thing. At the European Film Awards, Emilia Pérez swept the ceremony with Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Screenplay wins. At the Capri Film Festival earlier this month, Emilia Pérez won six awards, including Best Film. BAFTA voters helped Emilia Pérez set a record with 15 longlist mentions, including list placements for all four actresses. At the Golden Globes, where more than 300 international journalists voted for the nominees and winners, Emilia Pérez was nominated 10 times, a record for comedy/musical movies, winning four. Put it all together, and it’s hard to ignore that the film is going over better outside the U.S. than inside its borders. That’s key, particularly since the Academy has greatly diversified its membership over the last decade. More than 20 percent of Academy members are from international countries, and — barring an absolute shocking snub — this will be the seventh year in a row when a film not in the English language is nominated for Best Picture. Can Emilia Pérez join Parasite as the only non-English film in Oscars history to win Best Picture? With international support and industry love, it might be an unbeatable combination. Unless…

Online, it’s a different story

Critics don’t really impact the Oscars race, and social media isn’t real life. However, the chatter around Emilia Pérez online has been largely negative. GLAAD has called the film “retrograde” in its depiction of trans women, a sentiment shared by other prominent LGBTQ+ media outlets. “I questioned when I was watching this, do we have enough diversity in storytelling to be putting stories like this out that kind of just feed the machine instead of challenging the machine? And the answer was no,” journalist Shar Jossell said on the NPR show Pop Culture Happy Hour. “That’s not to say that we can’t have crappy trans representation, but I still stand on: there’s not enough trans representation to make space for the crappy representation. And I’m not even being subjective with this. It is crappy. It literally leans into harmful tropes. … I felt that it did trivialize the trans experience and really reduce trans people to these, like, selfish deceivers. And I hated it.”

Emilia Pérez is a glorious disaster,Drew Burnett Gregory, a trans critic, wrote for Autostraddle. Not since Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways has a trans film been so bold and so boring all at once. But it’s been over a decade since that film and my patience is waining. Certainly, this shallow understanding of trans people can’t still be interesting to cis people. How many times do cis people have to learn about us before a portrayal like this one rings as false to them as it does to me?

Audiard has also been criticized for his depiction of Mexico, particularly because neither he, Gascón, Gomez, nor Saldaña is native to the country. In a widely shared interview, Mexican star Eugenio Derbez called out Gomez for her performance and her lack of familiarity with the Spanish language. “I feel like he did a very interesting experiment,” Derbez said last year on the Hablano de Cine podcast. He also questioned why Audiard chose to tell this story in the first place.

“I liked the film apart from Selena’s [scenes] that jump at you because it has manageable things. But I was saying, ‘How strange because if the director doesn’t speak English or Spanish and the movie is in Spanish and English, and it takes place in Mexico and you don’t understand the culture,’” Derbez said. “It’s like if I wanted to make a film in Russian without knowing the culture or Russian and speaking in French.” (Gomez later said she did the best she could with her character, Jessi, who — it should be noted — is American-born in the film and not a native Spanish speaker. Derbez has since apologized for his comments.)

But not everyone agrees. During the Golden Globes red carpet, True Detective: Night Country showrunner Issa Lopez, who is Mexican, called Emilia Pérez a “masterpiece.” After the Globes ceremony, playwright and screenwriter Jeremy O. Harris defended Emilia Pérez. He questioned why “queer media” would “so hungrily take a shot at the one film this season that has given a trans actress and multiple Latinas a historic awards haul.” And there is Gascón, who, from the Globes stage on Sunday, used the film’s Best Comedy/Musical win as an opportunity to speak out on behalf of trans people worldwide.

“I have a message of hope for you: the light always wins over darkness,” Gascón said. “I have a lot of things to say to you because you can maybe put us in jail, you can beat us up, but you never can take away our soul, our resistance, or our identity. And I want to say to you, raise your voice and say, ‘I am who I am, not who you want.’”

That could be a rallying cry for Emilia Pérez in more ways than one. As has been shown repeatedly, from Best Picture wins for Driving Miss Daisy and Crash to Green Book and CODA, even when critics loudly turn against an Oscar movie about a social justice issue, the Academy sticks with who they are, not who people always want.

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