“The Godfather,” “Ben-Hur,” “Casablanca.” Three of the most renowned and acclaimed masterpieces in film history, and three of the countless other classics that weren’t nominated for as many Oscars as director Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez,” a musical thriller following a cartel boss transitioning and adapting to live as a woman. Picking up 13 nominations including Best Picture and Best Director, this love for a film so xenophobic and devoid of sympathy will hopefully open the public’s eyes to how detached from reality the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has become.
Starting with the obvious: it is no easy task for a cisgender white male who doesn’t speak Spanish to write and direct a film in Spanish about a transgender Mexican female, but he could have at least done his research and tried his best to honor the cultures he is trying to encapsulate, which he has directly admitted to not doing, when he said “I didn’t study much,” and “I kinda already knew what I had to understand,” in a viral interview. This is the same cisgender white male director who is nominated for Best Director at the Oscars this year alongside the likes of James Mangold (“A Complete Unknown”) and Sean Baker (“Anora”), both of which have put much more thought and effort into crafting a story that feels much more in tune with the times than this stale, single-layered mess.
While political and social idiocy can be debated on forever, on a more grounded note, it’s genuinely a mystery to me what critics saw in this film. A musical with bad music, a drama that dulls down and borderline makes fun of true battles by those represented in the film and a director that has admitted to basing a film in Mexico in a language he doesn’t understand, involving a culture he hasn’t read up on, is sweeping through award ceremonies and embarrassingly cementing itself in the “Titanic” conversation when it comes to trophies.
In a world where so many people feel a lack of representation and empathy in the modern day, entertainment can be an accessible and effective format to help those suffering feel seen, shedding light on society’s many injustices. How such an uneducated and lame attempt at hiding an obvious lack of knowledge and reason behind unpleasant musical performances somehow was good enough to sneak into the 2025 Academy Awards seemed a mystery to many, including myself, and will go down as one of the most out-of-touch blunders by critics in the contemporary film industry.
