The Oscars 2025 nominations are out, and we can officially say that Emilia Pérez has already made history: its 13 nominations make it the most nominated non-English language production of all time, surpassing the previous record holders Tiger & Dragon and Roma, each bagging 10 noms in 2000 and 2018, respectively.
Emilia Pérez's success at the 2025 Oscars is not precisely a surprise — we are talking about a film that has not stopped sweeping since its official presentation at the Cannes Film Festival, where it bagged not only the Jury Prize but also a joint award for its female cast comprised of Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz. Netflix acquired the movie's exhibition rights in the United States and the United Kingdom; French audiences were able to see it in theaters as early as last summer, while other territories had to wait — with some still waiting — a little longer for its official premiere.
Presented as an eccentric narco-musical with an intense focus on visuals, Emilia Pérez might just be director Jacques Audiard's most atypical work to date. It's also undoubtedly his most successful — and highly problematic.
In January 2022, Télérama released a five-episode special covering Audiard's entire creative process for the movie. It went from the initial spark, which he said came to him while reading a novel by French author Boris Razon, to what would later become the first script for the film, written entirely on his own. It also went through an intermediate phase where Emilia Pérez was to be an opera in four acts.
If you have seen the movie, you'd know that this operatic spirit remains more or less intact in the final result. In fact, in interviews, Audiard has explained that the characters, dialogues, situations, staging, and, above all, musical numbers are not to be interpreted literally but rather as part of an artistic and hyperbolic hallucination that does not set out to portray the socio-political situation of 2025 Mexico City rigorously.
And here lies, in essence, the colossal conundrum that Emilia Pérez has posed among critics and audiences around the world, which we could summarize in a couple of questions: Does Jacques Audiard have the right to use the criminal terror of the Mexican cartels, a drama too real and painful for so many people, as the basis of his musical fantasy? Or is it all just frivolity bordering on insult?
To understand the debate in all its complexity, we must bear in mind that the film is also the chronicle of a transition, approached from a moral perspective and captained by an actress, Karla Sofía Gascón, who really gives her all in a role that is as utterly complex as it is revolutionary. (Though critics have debated whether or not the movie is a good piece of trans representation.) Without her, there would be no Emilia Pérez, an audiovisual experience that, while walking a tightrope, also dares to give free rein to the most irrational impulses. However, each viewer must decide whether or not the daring is worth it.
As Paloma González writes in GQ Mexico, "Emilia Pérez is a reality check in many ways." She refers to the fact that “it is not only a story of transition, identity, and freedom to live as we want (...); it is [also] a story that talks about violence, crime, corruption, sexism, and forced disappearances, although the latter takes a back seat.” According to González, in this sense, Audiard "proposes a kind of magical solution that does not reflect the complexity of the problem."
Mexican actor and producer Eugenio Derbez was not so sympathetic at first. “I was watching it with people who turned to look at each other and said, 'Wow, what is this?'” He was referring to Selena Gomez's polarizing Spanish diction, which has inspired memes galore that, in all honesty, seem to ignore the fundamental fact that Spanish is not her character's native language, so at least plot-wise, her accent is justified. Perhaps because of this, Derbez has since apologized for his initial comments, deeming them “indefensible" and saying they “go against everything [he stands] for.”
For his part, screenwriter Héctor Guillén has described Emilia Pérez as a “Racist Euro Centrist Mockery.” Speaking to BBC, Guillén said: “Their way of making the film is to disregard so many in the (film) industry in Mexico already talking about this topic, like not considering Mexican screenwriters, or more Mexican actors other than Adriana [Paz], who did an amazing job. Having a few Mexicans in there does not stop it from being a Eurocentric production.”
Still, Guillén describes Audiard as “a great filmmaker,” but his criticism expands beyond casting and crew. “There's a drug war, nearly 500,000 deaths [since 2006] and 100,000 missing in the country. We are still immersed in the violence in some areas. You are taking one of the most difficult topics in the country, but it's not only any film, it's an opera. It's a musical. So for us and many activists, it's like you are playing with one of the biggest wars in the country since the Revolution [in the early 20th Century]. Part of the plot is about searching [for] mothers of the disappeared [searching for their children], one of the most vulnerable groups in Mexico. And there were zero words in the four Golden Globe acceptance speeches to the victims.”
Now, we only have one question to tackle in this brief article: Why on earth has Emilia Pérez connected so intensely not only with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences but also with the Cannes jury and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association? Or put more simply: How can such a divisive movie sweep not only the Oscars but also Cannes and the Golden Globes?
One possible explanation could be traced back to the momentum that the musical genre is currently experiencing, as evidenced also by the many Oscar nominations accumulated by Wicked and A Complete Unknown. But even when only analyzing its musical elements, Emilia Pérez is divisive. How Audiard, composer Clément Ducol, and singer Camille have worked music into the movie is so disruptive that many purists of the genre find themselves unable to connect with the purely audiovisual facet of the film.
Other recent projects, such as La La Land ( 2017) or Sound of Metal (2019), also experimented with the medium but were much better received. Perhaps the crux of the matter for Emilia Pérez lies in the accumulation of all its controversial elements. And then the key to enjoying Emilia Pérez would lie in our ability (or lack thereof) to distance ourselves from the material and embrace Jacques Audiard's authorial vision on its own terms. As he himself argues, “Did Shakespeare need to go all the way to Verona to write a story about that place?"
This story originally appeared in GQ España. It's been translated and adapted by Sara Delgado.
