EMILIA PÉREZ AND THE CURSE OF OSCAR BAIT:
Last week, the nominees for the 2025 Academy Awards were announced. The leading contender with 13 total nominations? Emilia Pérez, a French-produced Spanish-language musical about a transgender Mexican drug lord and her underappreciated girlboss defense attorney. The film lost around $15 million at the box office on a relatively modest $26 million budget, so if you haven’t seen it, you likely aren’t alone and shouldn’t feel bad—it wasn’t made for you anyway.
Emilia Pérez is what people call Oscar bait: the sort of film that is made, seemingly, for the express purpose of catching the attention of the approximately 10,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Mostly film-industry insiders, their tastes are predictable. They like austere dramas and social commentary—stories that will make you cry while also attempting to say something about politics. Think of 2016’s Moonlight, a tragedy about a poor, gay drug dealer that grossed $65 million worldwide at the box office. It beat La La Land, which grossed $509 million worldwide, to the title of Best Picture. Or think of Nomadland, which won Best Picture in 2020: It follows a homeless widow who travels the country in a van after losing her job in the Great Recession.
The tastes of the academy are so predictable that they’ve been delightfully parodied—most succinctly perhaps in a 2008 episode of American Dad!, in which Roger the Alien takes on a supervillain persona and produces a film called Oscar Gold about an intellectually disabled Jewish alcoholic whose puppy dies of cancer while he’s hiding in an attic during the Holocaust. The movie is intended to make viewers cry themselves to death.
Late Night with Seth Meyers did a similar parody in 2017, producing a trailer for a fictional film simply called Oscar Bait featuring “racial tension,” “latent homosexuality,” the French language, and “dialogue that feels sort of profound.”
Karla Sofia Gascon’s back catalog of angry tweets (including the one below) gives the Academy a way out of the controversy if they chose to avoid giving a Best Actress award to a T-person: Giving it to Demi Moore for The Substance at age 62 would be akin to giving the Oscar to Paul Newman at age 61 for The Color of Money and Sean Connery at age 58 for The Untouchables: It might not be their best work, but they’ve certainly been in the business long enough that they deserve some sort of lifetime achievement award. At the start of the year, Variety noted that “Moore landed the first acting award of her career — yes, career — after taking home the Golden Globe for best actress in a motion picture, musical or comedy. She won for her go-for-broke performance as an aging celebrity in the body horror satire ‘The Substance.’”
