NOTE: This essay contains spoilers.

The rise and fall of Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language movie musical Emilia Pérez must be one of the swiftest turns of the wheel of cinematic fortune ever recorded. On 23 January 2025, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that the Netflix-distributed film had been nominated for thirteen Oscars—the second-highest number of nominations in the Academy’s history. The kudos list included Best Picture, Best Director (Audiard), and most importantly, Best Actress for Karla Sofia Gascón. Gascón is a transwoman who plays a cartel lord named Manitas and the titular woman he becomes after faking his death and undergoing a sex-change operation to avoid elimination by his business rivals. Had Gascón won in her category, she would have been the first biological male to carry away a statuette intended to honour female performances.

Instead, at the awards ceremony on 2 March, Emilia Pérez won a paltry two Oscars, both pointedly aimed at Gascón’s costar, Zoe Saldaña, who plays a young Mexico City lawyer named Rita, whom Manitas hires to arrange the legal and medical aspects of his transition. Saldaña won Best Supporting Actress, and a show-stopping number sung by Saldaña won Best Original Song. The film was otherwise snubbed by Academy voters because, on 30 January, just a week after the Academy announced its nominations, it emerged that Gascón had posted a series of very unprogressive tweets in 2020–21. Not only had she criticised Islam in quite strident terms, but she had also expressed her disdain for the canonisation of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in May 2020.

So, Karla Sofia Gascón was duly cancelled. Netflix pulled her from its promotion machine, Audiard publicly suspended all further communication with her, and the Academy decided to advertise its progressive bona fides by rewarding a film about a sex worker instead. Sean Baker’s Palme D’Or winner Anora, which stars Mikey Madison as a lap-dancer and part-time prostitute, walked away with five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director (Baker), Best Actress (Madison), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing.

This was quite a turnaround. Back in May 2024, Emilia Pérez had received a rapturous reception after it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. There, Gascón, Saldaña, and the film’s two other leads—Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz—jointly received a Best Actress award and the film itself picked up the Jury Prize. It also collected four Golden Globes, three Critics’ Choice awards, and two BAFTAs amid a flurry of lesser prizes. The critics mostly raved. “Very rarely does the right movie arrive at precisely the right time, at a moment when compassion appears to be in short supply and the collective human imagination has come to feel shrunken and desiccated,” enthused Stephanie Zacharek in Time on 13 November 2024 shortly after Donald Trump’s reelection as US president. Emilia Pérez’s theme of gender transition had seemed irresistible, because it combined fashionable feminist notions of “toxic masculinity” with a contrasting portrait of feminine sensitivity. Filled with remorse about the brutal ruthlessness of her life as Manitas, Emilia enlists Rita to help establish an NGO dedicated to locating the bodies of drug-war victims, thereby providing closure to grieving relatives.