Emilia Perez lead Karla Sofia Gascon is the first out trans person to be nominated for an Oscar. (Photo: Karla Sofia Gascon/ X)
Jan 24, 2025 22:29 IST First published on: Jan 24, 2025 at 19:28 IST
How might a film like Emilia Perez have fared in, say, the awards season of 1992? That was the year that The Silence of the Lambs swept the Big Five at the Oscars, winning Best Picture, Best Director (Jonathan Demme), Best Actor (Anthony Hopkins), Best Actress (Jodie Foster) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Ted Tally). In the 30-odd years since then, the reputation of The Silence of the Lambs has tumbled somewhat, going from “horror for the thinking cinephile” to a film that has some undoubtedly great elements — Hopkins and Foster, background score, dialogue — but struggles with its transphobia. And, here in 2025, the answer to our opening question becomes clear: Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, which tells the story of a Mexican drug lord’s transition to his true identity, that of a woman, would have barely got a look-in, let alone the record-breaking 13 nominations that it has scored at this year’s Academy Awards.
In that sense — of the kind of stories we want to tell and listen to — the world has come a long way. In another sense — of the kind that often leads to disheartening, even cruel real-world impacts — we’ve either stayed put or regressed. Life does not move like a plot, from scene A to scene B to scene C and so on — there is no coherent narrative. But if there were, we might draw a straight line between the executive order signed by US President Donald Trump this week, which rescinded the official recognition of more than two genders, and Emilia Perez’s stunning Oscar nominations sweep. Is this Hollywood thumbing its nose at the establishment, even as other great American industries, like Silicon Valley, bow down before it?
But the stories we tell ourselves do matter, as actor Demi Moore so astutely observed in her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes earlier this month, where she picked up the Best Actor trophy — the first ever in her four-decades-long career. For very long, she had believed — had, indeed, told herself — that as a mere “popcorn actress” she would never be recognised for her craft. Everything changed when she stopped believing in that story, and wrote herself a new one, one where as a 62-year-old in a notoriously ageist and sexist industry, she still had something of value to contribute.
The film that Moore received the acting nod for, The Substance, is itself part of a larger story that seems to be playing out at the Academy Awards this year. If the recognition earned by Emilia Perez — whose lead, Karla Sofia Gascon is the first out trans person to be nominated for an Oscar — marks a new chapter in the history of the Academy Awards, it shares this space with a handful of other nominees, scattered across categories: Anora, about a sex worker’s attempt to get her own fairytale; The Substance, a body-horror that skewers the glamour industry’s ageism and sexism; Wicked, a lavish musical rooted firmly in the transformative friendship between two women; and The Girl With The Needle, a historical horror (based on a true story) that tells of the women we don’t see and the awful choices they are often forced to make. These are stories of struggle and celebration, of feminine bonds and appetites, of a marginalisation that goes back centuries and doesn’t seem like it will end in any meaningful sense at least for a few more decades (the optimistic view, one might say).
Hollywood awards like the Golden Globes, the Emmys and the Oscars (especially the Oscars), are often dismissed as self-congratulatory pats on the back that an industry in love with its own reflection bestows on itself every year. And that reflection has, usually, been cis-male, White, and straight, even as the industry itself morphs into something less historically recognisable but vastly more relatable. So it is exhilarating for anyone who cares about cinema and the realities it borrows from and shapes to feel like they’re witnessing what may very well be a historic Oscars. It is also, at the same time, disheartening to acknowledge that mere nominations feel like progress — who even remembers the other nominees in the categories that The Silence of The Lambs swept, back in 1992? Having been bold enough to nominate a trans actor in a major acting category, and ensuring that the stories of women are not crowded out this year too, the Academy — which was again somehow only able to find one woman to nominate for Best Director (Coralie Fargeat, The Substance) — is on the verge of making history. As scene A fades out, can it move on to the only scene that will now matter?
pooja.pillai@expressindia.com
