Will 'Emilia Pérez' Be This Year's 'Crash'?

When the Academy tries to send a message, they usually scribble it in crayon.

The Academy announced the Oscar nominations yesterday, and Emilia Pérez led the pack with 13 nods, the most ever for a foreign-language feature. While this may signal broad support among Academy voters, I’m more inclined to read it as 1) Netflix has a lot of money, and they’ve been good at scoring plenty of nominations but not necessarily wins (e.g. Maestro received seven nominations last year and zero Oscars); and 2) The Academy is now heavily comprised of international members, and we shouldn’t be surprised that a French director (Jacques Audiard) found success with a story set primarily in Mexico.

But this could also be part of a larger historical trend where the Academy’s clumsy liberalism rears its head to make a statement, but only shows the limits of voters’ empathy and understanding.

For those who don’t know, Emilia Pérez is the story of Mexican cartel head Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón) who recruits struggling attorney Rita (Zoe Saldaña) to help him fake his death and create a new life as a woman, Emilia (Gascón, again). However, when living as Emilia, she still wants a relationship with her children while not divulging the truth about her full identity to those children or her ex-wife Jessi (Selena Gomez). It’s also a musical.

To give the most charitable reading possible to Emilia Pérez, Audiard is trying to show how the boundaries we set in life are artificial. A man can transition to a woman, a drug cartel drama can be a musical, and a French director can make a movie largely in Spanish. The film also feels like it has its heart in the right place by casting a trans actor to play a trans character. The underlying themes do make sense.

But in execution, the film is a whiff. Audiard has made some great movies (A Prophet, Dheepan, The Sisters Brothers), but Emilia Pérez is not one of them. Musicals need good songs, and Emilia Pérez doesn’t have any. It requires effective musical numbers where you’re swept up in the singing and dancing, and Audiard relies largely on quick cuts to cover up a lack of choreography and design (say what you will about Wicked, but I can tell what’s happening and the choreography tends to reinforce the spirit of the song).

However, the most egregious aspect is how it views trans life, which, bluntly, feels like how a cis-gendered man thinks of trans people. In the framing of Emilia Pérez, Emilia is still a disguise. Rather than get into the complications that trans people face in living their true lives, Emilia Pérez borders on a comedy of errors where the central conflict becomes Emilia trying to get back to her family without revealing her past as Manitas. To put it another way, you could tell almost the exact same story if Manitas faked his death to become another guy. The transness of the character doesn’t feel lived in or distinctive. It is a “trans” movie in name, but not in deed.

Karla Sofía Gascón as Emilia Pérez in Emilia Pérez | Image via PAGE 114 - WHY NOT PRODUCTIONS - PATHÉ FILMS - FRANCE 2 CINÉMA

Allyship matters, but sometimes you can do more harm than good. This brings us to the Academy’s choice for the Best Picture of 2004, Crash.