On January 23, the nominees for the 97th annual Academy Awards were announced. Many were shocked by the Academy’s most nominated picks. One film out of them all became the most controversial and talked about nominee yet: Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez.
The movie received 13 nominations from the Academy, making it the most nominated non-English film in Oscars history. It also ties with last year’s Best Picture winner, Oppenheimer, which was critically acclaimed and beloved by audiences worldwide. Compared to the impact Oppenheimer made on its audiences, Emilia Pérez looks microscopic.
After the nominations were announced, people online began to share clips from the movie in which they ridiculed the film and shared their thoughts on how they could not believe it was nominated for not just one Oscar, but the most of any film this year. And to those users, I find I must agree with their criticism.
By doing just a quick Google search of the movie, I can find that it is the lowest-rated Best Picture nominee this year, scoring a 73% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, and a jaw-dropping 17% among audiences with over 5,000 ratings posted by users on the website, with the second lowest Best Picture rating (Nickel Boys and The Substance) having a 58% score rating with Emilia Pérez.
Now, out-of-context, cringe-worthy scenes from the movie can’t be the cause for that insanely low score, can it? Nope. The plot of Emilia Pérez is that a Mexican drug lord (Karla Sofia Gascón) seeks the help of a lawyer (Zoe Saldaña) to transition into a woman. After its release in Mexico on January 23, many Mexican people criticized the movie for its offensive depiction of their country.
The Failure to Pay Tribute to Mexico
First off, the writer and director of the film, Jacques Audiard, is a French man, which is not a problem in itself, until you dig deeper into his process of creating Emilia Pérez. Audiard does not speak any Spanish. Also, he did not find it necessary to shoot the movie in Mexico, opting instead to produce it in a studio near Paris. You’ll also find that in November last year, Audiard said that he “didn’t study much” about Mexico and “kinda already knew what he had to understand” about the nation.
This outraged many people, and this statement made me begin to question what Audiard knew about Mexico as a French man. They believed it was necessary to research the country’s past and present before diving into a film surrounding the Mexican cartel, a complex and sensitive topic for its citizens, who have all been affected by the violence of the nation’s drug war in one way or another.
Audiard defended himself by saying, “It might be a little bit pretentious of me, but did Shakespeare need to go all the way to Verona to write a story about that place?” Perhaps Shakespeare didn’t need to go to Verona to write Romeo and Juliet, but the entire story of Romeo and Juliet is about them, not about the place they come from. Not to mention, Shakespeare didn’t have an estimated net worth of $27 million like you do, Jacques.
An article written by the Associated Press asked Mexicans how they felt about the film, and they all shared the same sentiment: the movie was just plain offensive. Dora Pancardo felt that Audiard wanted to “convey the part that we’re in a violent society, which isn’t a lie, but it seemed crude to me.” She also criticized Selena Gomez’s performance in the film saying, “I also didn’t like that Selena Gomez spoke such bad Spanish,” noting that “certain dialogue and certain expressions” were said in the movie that people don’t use in Mexico.
Another problem people had with Emilia Pérez was that in a movie about Mexico about Mexican people, only one of the main actresses, Adriana Paz, is Mexican. The others, Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez, are both from the US. Both Saldaña and Gomez’s characters were re-written from being Mexican to fit their own backgrounds: Saldaña’s into having a Dominican background and Gomez’s into having a Mexican-American one. The lead actress, Karla Sofía Gascón, is Spanish. When asked about the casting choices, the film’s casting director Carla Hool, who is from Mexico, said they searched Mexico and Latin America for actors, but believed they found the best actors possible for Emilia Pérez.
Yet, the discourse over the actors’ performances says otherwise. On the Hablando de Cine Con podcast, Mexican comedian Eugenio Derbez called Selena Gomez’s accent in the film “indefensible.” Host Gaby Meza agreed, commenting that she felt she didn’t know what Gomez was saying, adding, “if she doesn’t know what she’s saying, she can’t give her acting any nuance.” Gomez replied to these comments underneath a clip from the podcast posted on TikTok, saying that “I did the best I could with the time I was given.” Derbez quickly apologized to her on social media, retracting his previous statements.
Lastly, regarding Mexico, people felt that not just the violence in Mexico was poorly portrayed, but the culture that exists in Mexico was tarnished by Emilia Pérez. In an article titled, “Take it From a Mexican: Emilia Pérez is Trash,” Ces Heredia dissects the film and everything it screwed up on when it came to depicting Mexico. Heredia comments on Zoe Saldaña’s character Rita, who, in the opening credits, is shown to have a “very obviously American graduation photograph” where she holds her law diploma from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México—despite its strict rules about graduation photos. Furthermore, Rita argues a case against a jury, despite juries not existing in Mexico’s judicial system.
Heredia takes very valid offense to these two errors and the others she did not directly mention. It’s the little details like these that add up into one big, steaming pile of disrespect from everyone who worked on this movie and did not think to research anything.
The Trans Community’s Point of View
It’s not just the Mexican community that have taken offense to Emilia Pérez, but also the trans community. In November 2024, GLAAD released an article titled “Emilia Pérez” is Not Good Trans Representation, featuring opinions of many people in which they discuss how they felt about the depictions of the trans community. Amelia Hansford, a trans woman, writes “Emilia Pérez’s screenplay is so cisgender it’s almost satirical. What’s immediately frustrating is that Emilia Pérez exudes a kind of confidence that’s almost nauseatingly sure of itself when it shouldn’t be.”
Drew Burnett Gregory names six trans tropes the movie wraps itself around like a warm, safe blanket. The list ranges from tropes such as a trans woman killer to a trans woman described as half male/half female, adding, “I’m not offended by anything on that list, it’s that it’s boring.”
As bold as Emilia Pérez claims itself to be, it clings onto the same recycled cliches as any other movie does. And for a film, in just its premise, to be something no one has ever really seen before—a Mexican drug lord becoming a woman—it should feel different. It should feel new. But it doesn’t. It feels outdated. It feels like someone hit you in the head with a frying pan, and then blamed you for being offended by it.
Outside of Emilia Pérez: A Star is Born Cancelled
Lastly (yes, there is still more to dissect about this movie), on January 30, writer Sarah Hagi released screenshots of Karla Sofía Gascón’s old tweets spanning years in which she made disgustingly Islamophobic and plain old racist remarks. In one tweet, Gascón writes, “Islam is becoming a hotbed of infection for humanity that urgently needs to be cured.” In another, she asks, referring to Muslims, “How many times will we have to expel these madmen from Europe until we realize that their religion is INCOMPATIBLE with Western values?” Gascón wrote dozens of tweets about Muslims, all filled with derogatory language and hurtful statements. She also called George Floyd, a victim of police brutality that sparked the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, “a drug-addicted con artist” in a Twitter thread. During the 2021 Oscars, she commented on the diverse number of winners by saying, “I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration, or the 8-M.” It is deeply saddening to know that someone who became the first openly trans Oscar nominee for Best Actress was so cruel to the Oscar winners in a history-defining year barely five years ago. After these tweets were released, Gascón apologized for her tweets in a statement released by Netflix.
Gascón, instead of letting people process her apology, decided to go on a social media frenzy and participate in interviews with numerous news institutions, which in turn ruined any chance of her apology seeming genuine as she had begun a mission to come out of the situation looking like a victim. During an interview with CNN en Español, she said, “I cannot step down from an Oscar nomination because I have not committed a crime.” However, it definitely seems like her chances of winning an Oscar have plummeted to zero.
By continuing to post on her Instagram account almost daily since the tweets were exposed, she has made everyone involved in the film distance themselves from her, including her co-stars and director Jacques Audiard. Zoe Saldaña, when asked by The Hollywood Reporter about what happened, said, “I’m still processing everything that has transpired in the last couple of days, and I’m sad.” While Saldaña seemed more secretive about whether or not she was still in touch with Gascón, Audiard was very straightforward about his current relationship with Gascon when he was interviewed by Deadline about the situation. He said, “It’s very hard for me to think back to the work I did with Karla Sofía. The trust we shared…when you have that kind of relationship and suddenly you read something that that person has said, things that are absolutely hateful, of course that relationship is affected.” He called her words “inexcusable” and when he was asked if he had spoken to Gascón, he said, “I haven’t spoken to her, and I don’t want to. She needs space to reflect and take accountability for her actions.”
Even Netflix, the distributor of Emilia Pérez, has taken steps to remove itself from being involved with Gascón. Variety reported that Netflix and The Lede Company (Gascón’s PR firm) were no longer directly speaking to the actress, but instead chose to communicate with only her talent agent. Netflix has also decided to no longer pay for Gascón’s travel and styling costs for award shows, which will most likely cause her to miss out on several of the events. Netflix has seemed to scrub Gascón from its Oscar campaign materials for Emilia Pérez, shifting its focus onto Zoe Saldaña, who won a Golden Globe just last month for her acting in the film.
Many wonder if Gascón’s past has ruined the future of Emilia Pérez and its capability of winning Oscars, now that its main star has overshadowed any positives that have come out of the film. Some Oscar voters, who asked to stay anonymous in a Variety article, stated that they are moving on from her and the movie. One Academy member said, “Damn, I almost felt sorry for her at first, but now I’m like, ‘F*** that.”
Some members are split on how Gascón’s actions will affect Emilia Pérez’s success at the Oscars, with one saying, “I judge the film on its merits. I can’t judge what others do outside of it.”
Another said, “I think it’s going to have a huge effect. It left a bad taste in people’s mouths. I don’t want to live in a world where a racist and bigot is highlighted and rewarded. I was going to vote for her, but how could I now?”
One thing is for sure, Gascón has surely harmed the success the movie has had, and will continue to do so if she keeps making any more statements online and scheduling interviews behind her team’s backs. But, there is really only one way to find out the fate of both Gascón and Emilia Pérez, which is to watch the 97th Annual Academy Awards on March 2 at 7 pm.
