Gone with the Wind, Oppenheimer, Forrest Gump, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Chicago, Mary Poppins and Emilia Pérez all are in Oscar history as recipients of 13 nominations, except it is almost certain that you barely recognize the last name and even more unlikely to have even seen it despite being on the top streaming service for a few months now.
As tenuous a grasp the Oscars had on legitimacy after a couple of decades of suspect & downright horrible nominations & winners - forget Shakespeare In Love, who wants to defend The Shape of Water (aka Grinding Nemo) as Best Picture? - they went all in this year with their us-versus-the-audience (and American voter) overkill of love for Emilia Pérez, the most DEI of DEI nominees. Elevated as a political tantrum over recent election results, it is ironically imploding due to political correctness and cancellation coming for its star and only reason anyone pretends to like this bizarre mess of bad music and bad storytelling.
Nominated for Best Picture, Director, Actress (LOL), Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing, Makeup & Hairstyling, Original Score, International (non-English), Sound, and two Song noms which caused the broadcast to not perform the nominated songs, it's the next stop on the Oscars Death March.
We open meeting Rita Castro (Zoe Saldaña, Lioness), a lawyer in Mexico City who is concocting a defense for her client who is accused of murdering his wife. When a witness refuses to testify, she decides to blame the media for driving the woman to suicide. After the guilty man is acquitted, she receives a call from a man wanting to meet her and tells her to be at a newsstand in 10 minutes.
She does so and is promptly abducted, ending up in the back of a mobile crime lord truck face to face with Juan "Manitas" Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón, nothing you've heard of under his birth name of Carlos), a bearded cartel kingpin who wants Rita to do him a favor in exchange for many dinero: He wants her to find a surgeon to mutilate him into a simulacrum of a woman and relocate his wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez, Wizards of Waverly Place), and two children to Switzerland, telling them it was for their safety from his enemies. He's been taking hormones for two years and has developed breasts that no one in his gang or the wife has noticed somehow.
Rita first travels to Bangkok (for a number that became a viral laughingstock) then Tel Aviv where she meets Dr. Wasserman (Mark Ivanir, Schindler's List) who sings a song about how surgery doesn't really change who one is (phobe!), but he agrees to travel to Mexico to meet Manitas. After their discussion, the deal is made. Jessi and the kids relocate to Switzerland, Manitas fakes his death, then goes under the knife, becoming Emilia Pérez.
Four years pass and Rita has relocated to London. (Money buys a better peer group.) At a dinner party, a burly woman chats with her and Rita rapidly realizes who it is. What he wants is to see his children again and he has Rita uproot Jessi and the kids and return them to Mexico City where they will live with Manitas' wealthy sister Emilia in a Mexican Mrs. Doubtfire scenario. While Jessi doesn't notice that Auntie Emilia has the exact same build (plus breasts) as her dead husband, his son recognizes his smell and sings a song about it.
One day, Emilia and Rita are having lunch when a mother leaves a flyer for her missing son on their table. Emilia decides that his new life purpose is to use his wealth gained from being a cartel boss (and making many mothers sons disappear himself) to start a NGO to have imprisoned sicarios tell where they disposed of their victims so that families can find closure. One woman, Epifanía (Adriana Paz), whose abusive husband had been missing for five years, attracts Emilia and they immediately hook up. Meanwhile, Jessi is contacting her old lover, Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez).
Normally, I wouldn't go too in-depth of the rest of the plot, but since this is a Skip It movie that is unworthy of almost all of the hype, I'm going to lay out the rest of the story so you can see just how badly it ends.
Jessi announces that she is marrying Gustavo, so thanks for the place to stay, Emilia, but we're leaving. He flips out and attacks her, slipping and saying she can't take "my children" away. Spooked, Jessi disappears in the night with the kids. Emilia cuts off Jessi's credit cards and has his goons beat up Gustavo, giving him $100K to leave down or else. So the lovebirds retaliate by kidnapping Emilia and sending a couple of his fingers to Rita as the opening gambit of a ransom exchange.
When the exchange goes sideways, Gustavo throws Emilia in the trunk of a car, and he and Jessi drive off. Having just discovered who Emilia really is, Jessi pulls a gun on Gustavo and in their struggles, the car drives off a cliff, crashing then exploding, killing everyone. A funeral procession with an effigy of Emilia is parading through the streets while a massive crowd sings her praises as a modern saintly icon and the kids end up with Rita to be raised. The end.
No, I am not making this sh*t up.
Before addressing the controversies, let's discuss the merits of the film itself...........ummmm, well, one of the musical numbers isn't total trash and Saldaña is excellent........that's about it.
It's hard to pick a spot where to begin thrashing this mess, but let's go with the "musical" part of this self-proclaimed "genre-defying" (translation: mash-up that does nothing well) where actors who mostly can't sing perform tuneless tunes with no lyrical sense, melody or structure. I'm not expecting Chicago fercryingoutloud, but doughy dork Joss Whedon wrote 15 songs in various styles for the legendary Buffy the Vampire Slayer Once More, with Feeling episode that are all streets ahead of the atonal tripe by composor Clément Ducol and French singer Camille. They sound like they were written by AI trained on SoundCloud accounts of rapper wannabe teens with cracked copies of FL Studio. (And two of these are nominated, though one is OK.)
Then there's the whole "leave my life of crime behind and do good" premise. OK, sure, fine, whatever, but at no point does Manitas/Emilia atone for HIS sins. He doesn't unearth his victims or suffer any consequences for his actions. Starting the NGO and having all the other thugs who ARE serving time for their criems fess up is his good deed and he gets a girl, a parade, and an icon in his honor. What a mensch. And as shown by his explosion of rage at Jessi's planned nuptuals, you can cut the balls of the cartel boss, but you can't take the toxic masculinity out of the woman he's pretending to be. Oy vey.
The only character who really has some development is Rita, ferociously played by Saldaña, and who is really the lead with ten percent more screen time than Gascón, but ending up nominated for Supporting Actress. Saldaña has been underestimated as a talent for over 15 years because genre entertainment almost never gets recognized and three Star Trek movies as Lt. Uhura, three Guardians of the Galaxy movies where she's painted green, and a pair of Avatar movies where her performance capture was transformed into a giant blue Thundersmurf don't exactly scream, "Give that gal a trophy!" but here she makes a career-changing impression.
In her portrayal, Rita is a complex, guilt-ridden woman who sells her soul for riches then tries to earn it back with good deeds as best she can when her benefactor is a killer with issues. Saldaña's pre-acting training as a dancer is showcased in the one non-terrible song and number, "El Mal" ("The Evil"), where Rita points out all the corrupt politicians attending a fundraiser for Emilia's organization. (Thankfully, Netflix posted the number on YouTube so you can watch the best part of this thing for free. You're welcome.)
Which leaves us with the penis elephant in the room and the only reason Emilia Pérez has become the cause which Hollyweird has chosen to set their images on fire to match their city in the wake of the wildfire borne of their poor political priorities: Gascón's status as a "transgender woman" (read: a man) at a time when the Normies, whom our self-anointed elites loathe, have finally united to reject this woke madness which has destroyed countless troubled young people bodies. As a mighty FU to a nation who voted incorrectly according to Hollyweirdites, they nominated this movie for pretty much every category, pushing aside more deserving candidates, in order to promote a movie no one likes other than critics and awards bodies.
Gascón being nominated in the Actress category is inexcusable. Not because he gives a bad performance - ironically it isn't that bad as his portrayal of a man who longs for his children and then can't control his possessive nature with disastrous results has nuance - but for the simple fact he isn't a woman. Period. (Which he can't have.) If he had been nominated as Best Actor, there'd be no complaints, but then what sort of political benefit would acknowledging basic biology provide the Academy who desire to signal virtue more than reward genuine excellence?
Who knows which biological woman's performance got shoved off the podium by this stunt - Angelina Jolie in Maria; Nicole Kidman in Babygirl; Lily-Rose Depp in Nosferatu; Saldaña herself here? - but it flies in the face of previous handling of gender-bending performances. Linda Hunt won Best Supporting Actress playing a male role in The Year of Living Dangerously; Hillary Swank won Best Actress playing a transish role in Boys Don't Cry; Felicity Huffman was nominated as Best Actress for Transamerica, playing a pre-operative male-to-female character; and Jaye Davidson was up for Best Supporting Actor for The Crying Game way back in 1993. (I hadn't seen the last one before the Oscar nominations were announced, but knew the basic plot about the soldier's "girl" and was puzzled why the actress was nominated in the male category. Spoiler alert!) It's not a hate crime to properly categorize actors.
The Academy convulsed with such outrage at the return of the Bad Orange Man (who hadn't ushered in fascism last time and didn't arrest a single star howling to eff him) that they punished a fellow actress (back of the bus for you, ladies) and cost others like Stéphane Fontaine, cinematographer of Conclave, his nomination in favor of the ugly work here by Paul Guilhaume. Quality is out, pretending that nominating a French film set in Mexico, told in Spanish, with a trans "actress" lead will make the Bad Orange Man's golf game suffer is in. (News Flash: He didn't even notice or care.)
The cruel irony of making Gascón their hero(ine) is that the discovery of old tweets where he expressed incorrect thoughts about the Religion of Peace, George Floyd, and the Academy itself made him a pariah amongst his former advocates and writer-director Jacques Audiard and Saldaña disavowed him in order to save themselves. (LOL.) Not even being the apex predator of the intersectional hierarchy allows for impolite thoughts about the folks who attacked the offices of French humor magazine Charlie Hebdo 10 years ago, killing 12 and prompting declarations of "Je suis Charlie" ("I am Charlie") from the same celebs now distancing themselves from him. Hypocrites.
And as mentioned, all of the hype, praise, awards (it won the Golden Globe and the Jury Prize at Cannes), or nominations have enticed the Normies to watch it. It's been on Netflix since mid-November 2024 (three months at this writing), no trip to the art house movie theater (if your town even has one) to see it required, and I don't recall ever seeing it on the Top 10 Movies list. Not when the critics gushed over it then, not when it won the Golden Globe, not when it got 13 Oscar nominations. Try as they might, they can't make fetch happen. Womp womp!
And it's not just red state bigots who had a problem with it. Mexicans were offended that a French filmmaker shot his Mexican story in France with a cast of non-native speakers. While Saldaña had some experience owing to her Dominican background and brushed up, apparently Texas-born Gomez had to crash course and learn phonetically. While my gringo ears couldn't tell, the real people could. LGB groups also weren't appreciative of the tokenized and trite portrayal of their condition with GLAAD calling it "a profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman" and "a step backward for trans representation" Ingrates!
From a technical standpoint, there's nothing in the nominated image or nominated sound that justifies their nominations. If you're not paying for the most expensive tier of Netflix, you're missing nothing. It's functional and nothing more.
While a lot of YouTubers without any current Star Wars content to thrash on for clicks have taken their whacks at Emilia Pérez as the worst movie ever - if it had won, it would've joined Hollyweird's racism fantasia Crash on Worst Oscar Winners lists - I think a smart take comes from Film Threat founder Chris Gore who said that if John Waters had made this and it starred Divine, it would've been a hilarious camp classic. But Waters didn't, and if he had it wouldn't have served as Hollyweird's latest cudgel against an audience they've driven away so hard over the past five years that they're going to collapse into insolvancy eventually. And if not for bad tweets, Hollyweird could've chopped their own junk off for it. (They'll probably go with The Brutalist or Anora instead.)
Score: 3/10. Skip it.
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