Only three films have ever received more Academy Award nominations than “Emilia Pérez.”
But alongside its 13 nominations, which include best picture, best director, best actress and best supporting actress, there has been a consistent string of controversies surrounding the film and its Oscars campaign.
Directed by the French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, “Emilia Pérez” tells the story of Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña), a lawyer who is hired to help a Mexican cartel leader (Karla Sofía Gascón) retire, transition into living as a woman and reconnect with the children she had with Jessi Del Monte (Selena Gomez).
Though the film was celebrated at the Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered last May and took home the jury prize, the response from viewers, critics and L.G.B.T.Q. organizations haven’t been as positive.
The film currently has an audience score of 16 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. GLAAD, one of the country’s leading L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups, didn’t include the film in its annual awards and called it “a step backward for trans representation.”
While the film is set in Mexico (though filmed almost entirely on sound stages in France), audiences there weren’t so pleased with the film either. A group of Mexican filmmakers created the parody short film “Johanne Sacreblu,” which they described as “a French-inspired film made entirely without a French cast or crew.” It currently has over three million views on YouTube.
Use of A.I. in Hollywood has been a hot button topic for a while, but it resurfaced in regards to “Emilia Peréz” when it premiered at Cannes. The film’s sound mixer said that the film had used the Ukrainian software company Respeecher for voice cloning to improve Gascón’s range while singing. (It’s not the only film in this year’s race to do that — “The Brutalist” used the same company to tweak some Hungarian dialect for accuracy.”)
The biggest controversy, though, involved Gascón, the film’s star. In January, she made history as the first openly transgender actress to be nominated for an Oscar. But in the month that followed, the journalist Sarah Hagi unearthed tweets written by Gascón that criticized the diversity at the 2021 Oscars broadcast (“I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8-M”), George Floyd (a “drug-addicted con artist”) and Islam (“a hotbed of infection for humanity that urgently needs to be cured”). Though Gascón apologized through a statement issued by Netflix, she continued to defend herself on Instagram in statements not sanctioned by the streaming service.
At the Screen Actors Guild Awards last weekend, Saldaña and Gomez appeared together to introduce the film, which was nominated for three awards; there was no mention of Gascón and the clip package they presented only briefly showed her. Gascón was also absent from the Critics Choice, Directors Guild and Producers Guild award ceremonies in recent weeks. She is expected to be in attendance at tonight’s ceremony, though plans don’t seem to be finalized about whether she will be walking the red carpet or if she will be seated with the rest of her cast.
Almost all of these controversies occurred before Oscar voting closed in mid-February so tonight could be telling about the effect of this bad press on the outcome.
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