So the strange process of Oscar-night groupthink consensus begins, and a certain film becomes mysteriously garlanded as the obvious choice to be preferred over the others as the big winner. Jacques Audiard’s baffling, amusing, preposterous and (to some) artlessly offensive Mexican trans crime musical Emilia Pérez leads the field with 13 nominations. But for me, Emilia Pérez is pretty much the weakest movie on the best picture list, certainly not as good as, say, Nickel Boys, which doesn’t get much of the conversation.
But Emilia Pérez could be heading for the same kind of tulip-fever acclamation that greeted the phantasmagoric Everything Everywhere All at Once from 2022 which cleaned up on Oscar night. Awards season connoisseurs know how, in the world of bland streaming content, films that are different, which get Oscar voters excitedly alerting each other to their unusualness – without being too unusual – can generate their own momentum. It’s certainly a remarkable success story for Audiard, a French director in the classic mould, entirely and magnificently unaware of liberal Anglo-Hollywood squeamishness over whether or not certain stories are “his to tell”. A French auteur’s prerogative covers everything.
It’s always tricky to read Oscar nominations in terms of current American politics, but with Donald Trump back in office and resuming the demonisation of Mexican and LGBTQ+ people, some might feel that the Academy intends to hit back with its Emilia Pérez love – or that with the film’s allegedly inauthentic and stereotypical approach to Mexico, the film finds itself swimming in the general current. We shall see how many nominations Emilia Pérez converts on the night. Maybe its lead will evaporate. The Trump film The Apprentice has two nominations – best supporting actor for Jeremy Strong as young Trump’s attack-dog lawyer Roy Cohn and Sebastian Stan as the dubiously quiffed Trump himself – and some wins there would infuriate the new president.
But following Emilia Pérez is Brady Corbet’s toweringly strange and forbidding epic The Brutalist, about a Hungarian Holocaust survivor played by Adrien Brody coming to postwar America to be an architect. Shot in widescreen VistaVision, three-and-a-half hours long and sporting an old-fashioned intermission, it is mesmeric and compelling and, like Corbet’s previous two films, releases a depth charge twist-ending that sinks to the bottom and detonates just before the final credits, sending you back to think through everything you’ve seen. At 10 nominations, The Brutalist is, perhaps tellingly, neck-and-neck with a very different film, the musical Wicked, which delivers a sugar rush similar to eating your bodyweight in M&Ms. It really could go either way; between them, Wicked and Emilia Pérez could deprive Oscar night of its usual mood of frowningly earnest seriousness.
Behind them is the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown with eight; Timothée Chalamet may conceivably win the best actor award, although Brody is now the bookie’s favourite, and my gut feeling that Colman Domingo may clinch this for the sheer charm of his personality in the prison drama Sing Sing would be a very big upset. Edward Norton’s performance as Pete Seeger alongside Chalamet is excellent, but he is likely to lose out to Kieran Culkin’s hyperactive scene-stealer in Jesse Eisenberg’s talky comedy A Real Pain. Demi Moore will probably win best actress for her comeback turn in Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror The Substance, though I would prefer Mikey Madison to get it for her amazing, full-throttle performance in Anora as a New Jersey lapdancer whose Russian boyfriend takes her to Las Vegas to get married. I would also love to see Isabella Rossellini win best supporting actress for her enigmatic nun in Conclave, although Zoe Saldana appears to be in an impregnable position for her performance in Emila Pérez.
The snubs are various: I was disappointed to see nothing for Angelina Jolie’s performance as Maria Callas, less so for Nicole Kidman’s omission in the frankly underwhelming Babygirl. Hugh Grant and Daniel Craig would have enlivened these Oscars; and it is very frustrating that the genuinely powerful performance from Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths was overlooked.
But it looks as if, for good or ill, this will be the Oscars of Emilia Pérez – and it would certainly be an amazing coup for Audiard.