Yahoo Movies The rise and fall of Emilia Pérez: how did it all go so wrong for the Oscar-nominated film and its star?
You can generally tell when awards season is going well for a movie because its stars are everywhere, attending galas, treading red carpets, doing as many interviews as they can, and repeating the same bland sentiments about how special this movie is and everyone was a dream to work with. Conversely, you can tell things aren’t so rosy when your lead star is cancelling all their US appearances, being discreetly airbrushed out of the campaign and issuing statements such as: “I am deeply sorry to those I have caused pain.”
This is where Emilia Pérez and its lead, Karla Sofía Gascón, find themselves. Less than two weeks ago the movie was riding high, with a remarkable 13 Oscar nominations, including best actress for Gascón – the most for any movie this year and one short of the all-time record. Now, though, it is looking as if the wheels have come off for Emilia Pérez’s awards campaign, or at least for Gascón herself. Many are wondering how this could have happened so quickly; was it a spectacular act of self-sabotage, or are there darker arts at work?
At least part of this debacle has been self-inflicted. When Gascón won joint best actress at Cannes last May, the first transgender performer to have done so, she tearfully dedicated the award to all trans people “who suffer” and anticipated the online hate that was sure to follow: “Tomorrow, there will be plenty of comments from terrible people saying the same things about all of us trans people,” she said. “But I want to end with a message of hope … We all have the opportunity to change for the better, to become better people.”
But it turns out Gascón herself has been dishing out the online hate too. A recent excavation of the Spanish actor’s X/Twitter posts since 2016 unearthed many deeply problematic and offensive comments: about Muslims (“Islam is becoming a hotbed of infection for humanity”); about the victim of police brutality, George Floyd (“a drug addict swindler”); China (“The Chinese vaccine, apart from the mandatory chip, comes with two spring rolls …”); and even about the Oscars themselves. Commenting on the 2021 awards, where nominees included Nomadland, Minari, Judas and the Black Messiah and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Gascón wrote: “More and more the #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 [international women’s strike].” So much for becoming better people.
Ironically, this year’s Academy Awards are shaping up to be another ceremony for what some might call “independent and protest films”. This is the first Oscars of the second Donald Trump regime, with liberal Hollywood having failed to tip the balance in Kamala Harris’s favour, and there are nominations for stories about the young Donald Trump (The Apprentice), institutional racism (Nickel Boys), Catholic corruption (Conclave), conflicted women (Anora, The Substance), and bleeding-heart socialist hippy folk singers (A Complete Unknown).
And leading the charge is Emilia Pérez; a Netflix musical about a Mexican gangster (Gascón) who begins a new life by faking their death, transitioning and starting a charity dedicated to finding the remains of victims of Mexico’s cartel-related violence. Given the Trump administration’s vicious assault on transgender rights, this movie ought to be a rallying point for the culture war resistance. But when your star actor is championing one marginalised group while also demonising several others, it’s not a great look.
In response to the social media revelations, Gascón may have dug herself even deeper. In a subsequent interview – reportedly conducted without the oversight of Netflix – and an Instagram post, she alluded to unidentified adversaries who “have achieved their objective, to stain my existence with lies or things taken out of context”. She also denied she was a racist, claiming: “I feel and very much identify with the people who were thrown off buses for the colour of their skin.”
The traditional sentiment at this stage should be, “And it was all going so well”, except it wasn’t really. From the outset, Emilia Pérez has been battered by such a barrage of criticism and mockery, it’s a mystery to many how it got nominated for anything at all. The movie has its fans, despite or perhaps because of its wildly implausible plot and agreeably bizarre moments, such as a musical number set in a cosmetic surgery clinic (the lyric “Man to woman / From penis to vagina” has gone viral all on its own). But it has an audience score of just 18% on Rotten Tomatoes and a Letterboxd score of 2.2 out of five – the lowest scores for any best picture contender in history.
Jacques Audiard, Emilia Pérez’s writer and director, is no stranger to awards. Three of his previous films (Dheepan, A Prophet and A Self-Made Hero) also won major prizes at Cannes and went on to achieve great acclaim. Perhaps he just got bored of winning so easily. Emilia Pérez is certainly a departure for this straight, white, cis, French, 72-year-old director – a musical, in Spanish, set in Mexico, about trans identity. But in other ways it is not a departure at all, because Audiard didn’t even go to Mexico: he made the movie in a studio just outside Paris, with a principally non-Mexican cast and crew, led by Spain-born Gascón, Zoe Saldaña (who is an American of Dominican Republic and Puerto Rican descent) and US born-and-raised Selena Gomez.
Mexican audiences and critics have not known whether to laugh or cry at Emilia Pérez’s depiction of their country and culture. On the one hand, there is the cast’s accents. Mexican actor Eugenio Derbez said of watching Gomez: “Every time she had a scene, we looked at each other to say, ‘Wow, what is this?’” Gomez responded to him on TikTok: “I’m sorry, I did the best I could with the time I was given.” Again, not exactly an awards-season quote for the ages.
Mexicans have also taken issue with the way Emilia Pérez stereotypes their country as a landscape of death, drug cartels and gangsters, then uses the real-life plight of hundreds of thousands of missing persons as a backdrop for a song and dance. One Mexican screenwriter Héctor Guillén summed it up with a post on X that read: “This is a message to the Academy: Mexico hates Emilia Pérez” and described the film as a “racist Eurocentrist mockery”.
Camila Aurora, a trans Mexican film-maker, even returned the favour with her own parody film, Johanne Sacreblu, “a tribute to Emilia Pérez”, depicting stereotypically “French” people in striped shirts, berets and painted-on moustaches, dancing in the streets of “Paris” (but filmed in Mexico).
Audiard, who does not speak Spanish, was pretty blithe about all this initially. “I didn’t study [Mexico] much,” he said. “What I needed to know I already knew a little bit.” But when confronted at a press conference in Mexico, he backtracked. “If it seems to you that I do it too lightly, I apologise,” he said.
Despite Gascón’s heartfelt Cannes speech, many LGBTQ+ viewers have also found the film’s portrayal of trans people riddled with damaging stereotypes. The way Gascón’s character abandons her wife and children to transition, for example, or the way she sings about being “half him, half her … half kingpin, half queen”. Or how, during a scene when she turns violent and threatening, her voice reverts to the low, growly register of her “male” self, as if to suggest she’s “really still a man underneath”. Hence headlines from trans critics such as: “Emilia Pérez Is the Most Unique Cis Nonsense You’ll Ever See”. LGBTQ+ rights group Glaad called it a “profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman”.
It doesn’t stop there. It has emerged that Gascón’s singing voice in Emilia Pérez was AI-enhanced to increase her vocal range, which is likely a turn off for Academy voters. Another frontrunner in this year’s race, The Brutalist, has also had to defend itself over use of AI – to fine-tune the actors’ Hungarian accents.
But what of Gascón’s allusions to people out to “stain her existence”? Is it coincidence that these years-old tweets are coming out now, the week before the final round of Academy voting begins? Apparently so, according to Sarah Hagi, the freelance journalist who found them. Hagi denies she is a “studio plant”; after being alerted by Gascón’s use of the term “Islamist” in a post, she decided to dig deeper and was appalled by what she found. What’s more surprising is that all these comments were widely available online and nobody thought to check, including Netflix, which might not be in this situation had it thought to do some due diligence.
That doesn’t mean dark arts aren’t being deployed. In another unguarded moment last week, Gascón railed against rival “social media teams … trying to diminish our work”. In particular, she pointed the finger at the Brazilian movie I’m Still Here, whose lead Fernanda Torres is also up for best actress this year (and recently won the Golden Globe). “There are people working with Fernanda Torres tearing me and Emilia Pérez down,” Gascón stated in a Brazilian newspaper interview (though she later stressed she was not accusing Torres or her team directly). Torres’ only response has been an Instagram post saying how kind Gascón had been to her in person.
Days later it was Torres issuing the apologies, after footage resurfaced of her performing in blackface, in a comedy sketch on Brazilian television, 17 years ago. Unlike Gascón, Torres dealt with the issue swiftly and sincerely. “I am very sorry for this,” she said. “At that time, despite the efforts of Black movements and organisations, the awareness of the racist history and symbolism of blackface hadn’t yet entered the mainstream public consciousness in Brazil.” If it carries on at this rate, we’ll have to start a new Oscar category for best apology.
Despite the grandstanding speeches and appeals to higher values, awards season can still be ruthlessly aggressive. “It is deeply, deeply competitive, and ‘dark arts’, let’s not be naive, are definitely looked at,” says one veteran. Another commented: “It’s so Harvey Weinstein, isn’t it?” As head of Miramax, the disgraced producer was notorious for aggressively promoting his own films and trashing their rivals. In 1998, for example, he reportedly began a whispering campaign that Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan “tailed off” after its epic opening battle scene. Ultimately, Miramax’s Shakespeare in Love won best picture at the Oscars.
These days, though, you don’t even need a Weinstein-like figure pulling the strings. Amateur fans, or enemies, will happily do the work themselves on social media. “There’s now a willing cadre of people ready to jump on these things,” one publicist said. “There could be someone in the background orchestrating things, but I don’t know if that’s entirely necessary for something like this to happen.”
Perhaps this is not just an Emilia Pérez problem, then, but an awards season one. In recent years they have successfully cleaned up their acts. In 2021, the Golden Globes announced a “roadmap for change” in response to allegations of racism, corruption, favouritism and even sexual assault. The Academy has also undergone a decade-long overhaul in response to the #OscarsSoWhite backlash in 2015, inviting new members from a broader pool in order to dispel its “old white guy” dominance. It is this more modern, diverse, global academy that has elevated films such as Emilia Pérez – but if the goal was to champion diversity and highlight trans identity, it now seems to have backfired, erasing the trans actor who was supposed to be the hero of the year, and handing a victory to the anti-trans, anti-“woke” lobby the film was supposed to be standing against.
When artistic merit is increasingly overshadowed by mudslinging, dirt-digging, counter-recriminations and grudging apologies, it’s hard to see the awards season exercise as a pure “celebration of cinema”. Maybe it never was, but maybe it should be, and could be, with a little more compassion and better background checks. In the words of Gascón herself: “We all have the opportunity to change for the better, to become better people.”
