How the hell did EMILIA PÉREZ (2024) get nominated for 13 Oscars???

A question that is sure to haunt the minds of many generations to come.

- “I want to be a woman.”
- “Hmm? I don’t get it.”
- “What don’t you get?”
- “Do you want… to change your life, or to change your sex?”
- “What’s the difference?”

Personally, I blame Tom Hooper and his 2012 version of Les Misérables for popularising the idea of unpolished, live on-set singing as part of “grounded” movie musical productions, which trade on pretensions of lending an alleged gritty realism to a genre that doesn’t demand it, leading to many of the modern film musicals we’ve seen ever since that feel ashamed to be musicals.

Emilia Pérez isn’t necessarily ashamed of being a musical, given how much of it is inextricably infused with singing and dancing… but with the mediocre songbook it’s saddled with, and the oftentimes rather rough vocal deliveries from the actors half-heartedly sing-speaking so much of the questionable lyrics, perhaps it should have been.

Instead, what we get is a film that turns out to be one of the worst movie musicals since 2019’s Cats. And even then, Cats somehow has an edge over Emilia Pérez, because say what you (rightfully) will about repeat-offender Tom Hooper’s garish CGI human/feline-hybrid-filled musical monstrosity, but at least that hallucinatory nightmare of a cinematic trainwreck had Andrew Lloyd Webber’s solid compositions to work with. Meaning: it had actual songs you could remember, recurring melodic themes and motifs tying the whole work together in an overarching consistency borne from peak-era Webber having an undeniable knack for theatrical songwriting, and, when all else failed, it had Jennifer Hudson singing ‘Memory’. Meanwhile, Emilia Pérez doesn’t even have the courtesy of providing you a single ‘Memory’-level banger to take away from your viewing, probably due to the songs being largely uninterested in catchiness, and the cast not really having anyone among its ranks who can really belt out a tune to the show-stopping degree of Hudson, or any given musical theatre professional. This laissez-faire attitude, to putting proper effort and care into the things that ought to make the movie work, pervades Emilia Pérez like cigarette smoke in a French café.

(Is this an uninformed, lazy, stereotypical perception of France? Well, hey, if director Jacques Audiard can be that way about a country and culture that isn’t his, then so can I!)

How many people did Netflix have to bribe, and how many multi-millions did they have to spend, to bag Emilia Pérez a staggeringly ridiculous thirteen Oscar nominations?

Consider the calibre of cinematic company it keeps with previous films which received that outrageous number of Academy Awards to potentially nab.

1939 - Gone With The Wind.
1953 - From Here to Eternity.
1964 - Mary Poppins.
1966 - Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
1994 - Forrest Gump.
1998 - Shakespeare In Love.
2001 - The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
2002 - Chicago.
2008 - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
2017 - The Shape of Water.
2023 - Oppenheimer.

And now, 2024’s Emilia Pérez. A film so bafflingly devoid of good sense in its conception and construction, and so cursed in its ongoing public reputation (beyond the self-congratulatory inner circles of Hollywood, whose claims of loving the film I can only fathom through them getting paid to say as much), that it makes the mid-at-best, Harvey Weinstein-tainted Shakespeare In Love retroactively seem like a universally beloved masterpiece by comparison.

Yet, even if you were to strip away all the cascading controversies this film’s collecting like Pokémon with every passing day—

—the culturally ignorant and lazily (if at all) researched depiction of Mexico; the factually uninformed, retrograde representation of transgender people, on par with previous Oscar-bait drivel, 2015’s The Danish Girl (goddammit, why is Tom Hooper here AGAIN??!); the Respeecher AI used in post to fix some of the singing from Emilia Pérez herself, Karla Sofía Gascón; the validity, or lack thereof, in hiring Selena Gomez to play a predominantly Spanish-speaking role, without either giving her the time to perfect it to sound authentic to those attuned to the language’s nuances, or more easily hiring a different actor who could’ve spoken the language fluently; Gascón going from being celebrated as the first trans person to ever be nominated in the Oscars’ acting categories, to being pilloried on social media after a proliferation of her resurfaced old tweets show her to have espoused ridiculously racist rhetoric multiple times over the years; etc, etc—

—ultimately, Emilia Pérez would still be a failure on its own merits, because it’s just… blah.

It’s self-consciously strange and quirky, yet emotionally shallow and unrewarding.

The musical numbers tonally clash with the serious subject matter, while the songs themselves are either forgettable because they’re melodically incoherent and lyrically ill-structured, or they’re memorable because they’re simply so appalling, that you can’t help but ask in bafflement at the screen: “I beg your unbelievable pardon?”

(Yes, of course I’m talking about the ‘La Vaginoplastia’ song. “From penis to vaginaaaaaaa” will forever haunt my dreams. Also, the ‘El Mal’ song and dance number - the one with Zoe Saldaña in the red suit - may be the best musical part of the film, but that’s damning with faint praise, since even then, whenever I try to think of the song in isolation, its beat and melody makes my brain autocorrect it to either Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’, or the Jewish folk song, ‘Hava Nagila’.)

The film is neither campily over the top enough, nor dramatically mature enough, to adequately serve the needs of the genres it’s dipping its toes into with this whole unorthodox genre mashup experiment. Jacques Audiard - who I swear has done good work in the past, such as with 2009’s A Prophet - certainly has tried… something… with this big swing of his, but it was a resounding miss.

Well, except for the 13 Oscar nominations thing, which I’m sure he, and all his cast and crew, must consider to be a mark of the film’s quality in the long run, and vindication for their collective hard work, and the risks taken in making the film to begin with.

Does Emilia Pérez deserve the virulent hate it’s received?

Not all… but some, yes.

Curiously, when it was finished, I was left feeling too ambivalent about it overall to muster up much in the way of anger, let alone hate. It was a simple, self-evident truth that it’s bad, it’s misguided, it’s stupid, it’s weirdly boring, it’s unaware of how out of touch it is, and like the newly bloodless victim of a vampire, it pales deathly next to most of the films it’s managed to share this absurd awards season with, in virtually every regard.

Best Film Editing?
Not on your life. Like with Bohemian Rhapsody’s notorious nomination in the same category several years ago, Best Film Editing appears to have been mistaken by Academy voters as the equivalent to Most Noticeable Film Editing. (Also, quite frankly, the editing in Emilia Pérez is often just plain terrible. Especially that three-way split-screen sequence with the bad green-screen, and the TikTok-esque digital zooms. Woof.)

Best Cinematography?
Against Greig Fraser’s work on Dune: Part Two?! Are you taking the absolute piss?

Best Original Song?
Twice?!

Best Original Score?
Against Volker Bertelmann’s work on Conclave is a laughable prospect already, but to be in this category while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score for Challengers was egregiously snubbed? What nerve!

Best Director?
Baise-moi, non! Give it to the other French director in the category, Coralie Fargeat, s’il vous plaît! At least her film was actually, like, good.

And bloody hell, Best International Feature Film, and Best Picture?!
If Emilia Pérez wins even one of these statues, or god forbid somehow both, then we’ll know for sure this shit’s been rigged beyond repair…

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Rating: ★½

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