Why ‘Emilia Perez’ may be the worst Oscar best picture nominee in years

By most accounts, the Oscar-nominated “Emilia Pérez” is a terrible movie. Mexican critics panned the film’s portrayal of cartel violence, while trans critics hated how gender transition was used as an empty plot device with a highly inaccurate depiction of the medical process of transitioning. And yet the musical has been nominated for an incredible 13 Oscars, the most of any film this awards season. With an audience score of 16% on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s clear almost everyone hates this movie, it seems, except for Oscar voters.

While all of this film discourse has taken place, the Trump administration is in the midst of broadly sweeping away the legal existence of trans people across the U.S. This is not the first time Oscars voters have propped up a trans-related film in the middle of a national political movement against trans rights. In the lead-up to the 2016 Oscars, the state of North Carolina banned trans people from bathrooms in one of the first attacks on trans rights to reach nationwide awareness. The state was hit with mass protests and boycotts for its intolerance. At the same time, actor Eddie Redmayne was nominated for best actor for his portrayal of Danish trans woman Lili Elbe, one of the first transgender women to get gender-affirming surgery in the 1930s.

Redmayne’s casting and subsequent Oscar buzz was widely decried by trans people, who argued that the role of one of history’s most significant trans women should have been played by a trans actress. 

At the time, it was common practice to cast a cis male to play a trans woman in any mainstream Hollywood film, a decision that can incorrectly give moviegoers the idea that trans women are really men playing pretend as women. Just a year before, Jared Leto had won an Oscar for best supporting actor for playing a fictional trans woman in “Dallas Buyers Club.” A Redmayne win in 2016 would have given audiences the same idea. I can still remember the relief on trans Twitter that Oscar night when Redmayne didn’t win.

In the casting respect, at least, “Emilia Pérez” gets it right, having cast trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón in the lead role as a trans woman. She is up for best actress in this year’s Oscars, but her chances of winning are complicated by a series of offensive tweets about Muslims and George Floyd that surfaced from years ago.

As a trans person who also happens to run a podcast about cancel culture, I find it interesting that Gascón has been so quickly marginalized on the basis of old tweets, when other celebrities haven’t necessarily faced the same consequences for similar or even more egregious actions.

Make no mistake, the tweets are racist and Islamophobic, and should be condemned. But she would hardly be the first celebrity with bigoted opinions. I mean, Mel Gibson seems to be embarking on a comeback after his infamous antisemitic rants. They’re still making “Harry Potter” movies for J.K. Rowling. Dave Chappelle still has a robust comedy career.

The frustrating reality is that trans women are often the first to get thrown under the bus when it comes to controversies like these. Social media is littered with the former accounts of trans women who dared draw negative attention to themselves before being run off the internet.

While Gascón said she still plans on attending the award ceremony itself, she has skipped the typical pre-Oscars pomp and parties that usuallt come with being a nominee. It feels to me as if she has been thrown out of the club to allow the absolutely horrid film she starred in to stay in the general Oscar hunt for other awards.

Gascón may be seemingly out of the running for an Oscar even though she’s nominated, but her cisgender co-stars and the film itself are still up for multiple awards despite near universal distaste for the movie.

There’s precedent for all of this. In 2019, the Oscars gave best picture to “Green Book,” despite widespread criticism from Black film critics and audiences, and amid reports of derogatory tweets and racist language from co-writer Nick Vallelonga and co-star Viggo Mortensen.

In the end, I wish films wouldn’t get rewarded by the academy for telling awful trans stories, or for portraying trans women as men playing pretend. It bothers me that “Emilia Pérez” is getting so many flowers this year while films like “I Saw the TV Glow,” an incredibly produced and nuanced horror film from A24 that tells an allegory about being in the closet as a trans person, has gone widely ignored (even, shockingly, by the GLAAD Awards). “I Saw the TV Glow” connected viscerally with nearly every trans person I know who saw it, and it was directed by nonbinary director Jane Schoenbrun.

“Emilia Pérez,” on the other hand, perpetuates a lazy trope about the trans experience that feels especially harmful in the present political climate.