If you’re paying attention to the movies, you’ve probably already seen Emilia Pérez or at least heard a lot about it. The much-praised film is currently in the news because of the scandal surrounding one of its stars, Karla Sofía Gascón, whose controversial tweets from 2020–21 about Muslims, George Floyd, and diversity at the Oscars have resurfaced. They’re generating such a backlash that Gascón is being asked if she plans to “renounce” her Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in Emilia Pérez. 

Here are the most inflammatory tweets in question:

“I’m Sorry, Is it just my impression or is there more muslims in Spain? Every time I go to pick up my daughter from school there are more women with their hair covered and their skirts down to their heels. Next year instead of English we’ll have to teach Arabic.”

“I am so sick of so much of this shit, of islam, of christianity, of catholicism and of all the fucking beliefs of morons that violate human rights.”

“I really think that very few people ever cared about George Floyd, a drug addict swindler, but his death has served to once again demonstrate that there are people who still consider black people to be monkeys Without rights and consider policemen to be assassins. . . . They’re all wrong.”

“More and more the #Oscars are looking like a ceremony for independent and protest films, I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M. Apart from that, an ugly, ugly gala.”

“The Chinese vaccine, apart from the mandatory chip, comes with two spring rolls, a cat that moves its hand, 2 plastic flowers, a pop-up lantern, 3 telephone lines and one euro for your first controlled purchase.”

Gascón has made tearful apologies in interviews while at the same time denying that she is racist or in any way prejudiced, arguing that her tweets are being misunderstood or taken out of context. She has deactivated her X account and refuses to renounce her Oscar nomination.

But even before this most recent scandal, there was no doubt that the shine was increasingly off of Emilia Pérez. Mexican commentators and trans film critics denounced the film’s stereotypical representations in outraged terms. And there was an aesthetic backlash as well, as latecomers watching Emilia Pérez expressed amazement on social media that the film was ever received as such a masterpiece in the first place.

I share that amazement.

If you recall, after the film’s theatrical run, it had been playing on Netflix with a lot of accompanying hype. It has already won many high-profile awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globes. And it’s been nominated for a whopping thirteen Academy Awards (as many as Oppenheimer received), for Best Picture, Best International Feature Film, Best Director for Jacques Audiard, Best Actress for Karla Sofía Gascón, Best Supporting Actress for Zoe Saldana, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Sound, Best Original Score, and Best Hair and Makeup.

Our question, admittedly an annual one, is: What is the Academy thinking?

The film is a mess. Though it features a few compelling performances, it’s an incoherent musical melodrama of vast and alienating implausibility about a drug cartel boss (Gascón) who hires a jaded lawyer (Zoe Saldana) to arrange his escape from his old life through the process of gender transitioning. Once the former drug lord emerges as Emilia Pérez and is living an authentic and redemptive life as a woman, she and the lawyer help families uncover the fates of the family members disappeared by the drug cartels, including those she ordered “disappeared” in her old life as a man. Putting her new identity even more at risk, she arranges a way to cohabit with her former wife (Selena Gomez) and children, who don’t recognize her.

It’s a French production shot in France by arrogantly clueless French writer-director Jacques Audiard, representing a painfully stereotypical fantasy of Mexico and Mexican culture — the backlash in that country has been particularly intense. In response, director Audiard doubled down on his self-aggrandizing insensitivity with this retort: “Did Shakespeare need to go all the way to Verona to write a story about that place?”

Here’s a pat answer for Mr Audiard: It’s not 1595, and you’re not Shakespeare.

Emilia Pérez is equally reviled by the trans community for its wrong-and-insulting-in-every-particular imagining of the process of gender transitioning from male to female.  Given the wholehearted embrace of Emilia Pérez by the insular filmmaking community, it may come as a surprise to learn that adoration of the film doesn’t spread much further. According to handy rating systems helpfully laid out by Screen Rant here, the critical reaction to Emilia Pérez has been, to put it politely, “mixed,” and the general public hates the film.

Of course, there have certainly been films that did badly with critics and viewers upon initial release that were subsequently embraced as masterpieces. The 1939 French film The Rules of the Game, directed by Jean Renoir, is one that immediately springs to mind. John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) is another. Is Emilia Pérez another The Rules of the Game or The Thing? Time will tell. And it will tell us that the answer is no.

There’s a great deal of speculation about whether this latest scandal will torpedo not only Gascón’s Oscar chances but all the potential Oscars for Emilia Pérez. It depends on whether the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences opt to defy the volatile criticisms and continue to embrace the film. Of course, this representative body of the Hollywood film industry skews liberal and votes Democrat as far as politics go and is forever clumsily trying to present its progressive bona fides. The awkward knee-jerk attempts at inclusivity have often been mortifying, as critic David Opie of Yahoo notes when calling Emilia Pérez a “groundbreaking trainwreck.”

Stranger still is the embrace of Emilia Pérez by so many talented filmmakers. Guillermo del Toro has led the chorus singing the film’s praises, followed by such noted directors as Denis Villeneuve, Michael Mann, Paul Schrader, Nicole Holofcener, James Cameron, Jason Reitman, Reinaldo Marcus Green, Oliver Stone, and Taylor Hackford. Surely that should give us pause — top directors ought to be able to recognize a fine film when they see one, right?

But when considering whether to trust the judgments of filmmaking professionals, bear in mind how Academy Awards voting works. Generally, established professionals nominate their fellow professionals — actors cast the votes for actors, cinematographers for cinematographers, editors for editors, and obviously, directors for directors.

Yet how many times have you clutched your head in horror, or laughed hysterically, when you see the list of this year’s nominees?

Emilia Pérez once had a good chance of joining Green Book in the shamefully large category of Most Embarrassing Best Picture Awards handed out by the Academy. But perhaps now that possibility is waning.