Emilia Pérez’s Oscar nomination haul is regression masquerading as progress

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), which each earned 10.) It’s a Spanish-language film, set largely in Mexico, with a transgender 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 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; it is ultimately superficial in what it stands for. It’s stasis masquerading as change.

Glaad, the LGBTQ advocacy organisation, declared the film a “profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman”. Drew Burnett Gregory, writing for Autostraddle, stated: “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?” The film simultaneously proved unpopular in Mexico, where it was criticised for its reductive and inauthentic stereotypes. The point here is not to shame anyone who has enjoyed Emilia Pérez, but to ask the question: when the people represented on screen, for the most part, feel betrayed by what was represented on screen, how exactly can we call that progress?

Other Oscar frontrunners – Broadway adaptation Wicked, papal thriller Conclave, Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, and Sean Baker’s comedy-drama Anora – are all (better-constructed) crowdpleasers. But at a time when art is under threat more than ever, I can’t help but be frustrated by the lack of what feels genuinely challenging, of the kind of films that push the form in a new direction.

Which brings me, at least, to one pleasant surprise: the Best Picture nomination for RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys. It’s a film that feels meaningfully and creatively daring in all the ways Emilia Pérez proves superficial: using an immersive and moving point-of-view camera (criminally overlooked for Best Cinematography) and impressive sound design (also not nominated) to adapt Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel. The story is a fictionalised account of a friendship forged by two Black students at Nickel Academy, a so-called “reform school” (in reality a euphemistic term for a juvenile penal institution).

Although it’s been an awards season frontrunner from the start, I’m still reassured by how well Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist has done, with 10 nominations in total, coming second behind Emilia Pérez. Even as a fan of Corbet’s previous work, I found the awards buzz a pleasant surprise. The pint-sized future dictator of The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and the megalomaniac pop star of Vox Lux (2018) don’t exactly scream “awards-friendly”; The Brutalist, a handsomely shot historical epic about an immigrant Jewish architect, might have a better chance.

The Brutalist is a confrontational film.?It’s a story of American identity with no victory, and not even the quiet stoicism and regret of the Best Picture winner last year, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. It doesn’t give Hollywood much room to pat itself on the back. That’s why I suspect it won’t win all that much beyond Best Actor, for Adrien Brody’s stunningly vulnerable performance. Emilia Pérez, meanwhile, offers representation without challenging its audience much at all. And, in that sense, it’s part of a long Oscars tradition – from Crash (2004) to Green Book (2018).

Gascón is the first out trans actor to be nominated for an Oscar. And it’s important that any critique of Emilia Pérez recognises her work and her contribution to Audiard’s film. As Mey Rude, for OUT, wrote, “These critiques are downplaying, if not erasing, the hard work put in by Gascón to shape the character and the story itself, particularly the trans aspects, which changed a lot from Audiard’s original ideas thanks to Gascón’s input.” The actor has some level of authorship over the film.

If she wins, it will mean something. The inauguration of Donald Trump for his second term as US president has brought with it a wave of anti-LGBT+ legislation – the primary aim of which is ultimately erasure. To have a trans woman stand, speak, and be celebrated on such a global platform as the Oscars has its own significance.

But in the end, what is the point of rallying around a representation that doesn’t serve those it’s representing? Two prominent (and excellent) trans films from last year, documentary Will & Harper and surrealist horror drama I Saw the TV Glow, in which trans people tell the story themselves, were completely shut out despite being awarded elsewhere. It was, overall, a landmark year for trans cinema: see also Alice Maio Mackay’s horror T Blockers and Vera Drew’s superhero satire The People’s Joker. Yet, it’s Emilia Pérez – a film that, despite the efforts of its trans star, has still been accused of using her character as a narrative prop – that’s been platformed as the supposed pinnacle of this cultural achievement.

Hollywood wants to be seen as a liberal haven; in practice, only money really talks. And so we’re faced with the question, at such a profoundly dark time in America’s history: how will art respond? What world will it create for itself, when it is capitalism, and feigning loyalty to power, that decides over and over what kind of art is allowed to be created and distributed? I fear, as this year’s Oscar nominations suggest, that Hollywood will respond as it often has: with performative gestures, and not much else.