Oscar campaign for Emilia Pérez hits the buffers

The cast and crew of Emilia Pérez will attend awards ceremonies in Los Angeles this weekend without their star.

So what? She is Karla Sofía Gascón – the first openly trans woman to be nominated as best actress at the Oscars. Championed until last month as a trailblazer, she’s now been told Netflix won’t even fly her to LA for the awards season. She has been ostracised after a series of embarrassments snowballed into

• a masterclass in PR mismanagement;
• a cautionary tale about social media landmines and detectives; and
• a lesson for filmmakers on the risks of prioritising statements over story.

Emilia Pérez is a wildly experimental musical film about gender, cartels, Mexico and much else. Nominated for as many Oscars as Gone with the Wind, it built up marketing momentum at the Cannes film festival (Jury prize and Best Actress prize) and as a riposte for progressive Hollywood to the Trump campaign’s strident anti-migrant and anti-trans rhetoric.

Is it any good? That depends who you ask. It won four Golden Globes, but…

• It’s the worst reviewed Oscar Best Picture nominee ever on Letterboxd.
• It has a dismal 17 per cent audience score on the Rotten Tomatoes website.
• It has earned back barely half its estimated €25 million budget at the worldwide box office since its release six months ago in France.

Sympathy votes. Oscar nomination voting happened in stages between 14 November and 12 January, between Trump's win and his inauguration. If Academy members’ enthusiasm for Emilia Pérez was in part a reaction to his often reactionary campaign, it wouldn’t be unprecedented. Films that appeal to the Academy's progressive sensibilities, in a palatable package, tend to perform well in times of political turmoil:

• Crash was panned by many critics for its simplistic depiction of racial tensions in the US, but won Best Picture in 2006 as surging violence in Iraq dominated George W. Bush’s second term.
• Moonlight, about a gay Black teenager’s struggles growing up, was the first Best Picture winner of Trump’s first presidential term.
• Green Book, based on the true story of a tour through the segregated Deep South by an African-American pianist and his Italian-American driver, won Best Picture in 2019. When voting began, memories were still raw of a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a woman was killed by white supremacists.

Duff notes. Emilia Pérez is having a rough road to the Oscars even without the bad reviews and box office:

• A parody version stereotyping the French was released by Mexican filmmakers angered by Emilia Pérez’s depiction of Mexico, and the fact that it was filmed in France. The parody rated 4.6 out of 5 stars on Letterboxd compared with 2.2 for the original.
• Cartel victims started a petition asking that the film not be released in Mexico.
• Offensive tweets by Gascón were unearthed on Islam, China, George Floyd and diversity at the Oscars.

Gascón apologised for the tweets via Netflix, the film’s distributor, but then issued a more defiant statement suggesting she’d been targeted by “something very dark”. She’s since accused rival films’ social media teams of trying to undermine hers. If so, they succeeded. Why Netflix didn’t check her social media history before sending her out to sell the film remains a mystery.

Victim of success. If it hadn’t been seized on by the awards circuit, Emilia Pérez might have faded into obscurity and been enjoyed as a camp oddity. As things stand it’s doomed to be remembered for all the wrong reasons.