The first big hurdle of the 2025 cinematic awards season is now behind us, with the winners of the 82nd Golden Globes having walked away with their corresponding honors just last night.
Plenty of races are shaping up as expected; Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist has locked itself in as a juggernaut with wins for Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Motion Picture – Drama, while Kieran Culkin’s Best Supporting Actor clinch at the behest of A Real Pain should almost certainly be taken as an omen. Ultimately, though, the night belonged to Emilia Pérez, and that’s a big deal.
Indeed, Jacques Audiard’s crime musical snagged four wins from its leading 10 nominations (the second-most in Golden Globe history); Best Original Song (“El Mal”), Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture (Zoe Saldaña), Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language, and Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy.
“El Mal,” together with its fellow nominee “Mi Camino,” always had something of an edge over their Best Original Song competitors. Given that Emilia Pérez is a musical, the songs boasted a more direct, diegetic significance to the film’s mortal essence, which no doubt stacked onto the compositional competence that all the nominees had in common. With this in mind, “El Mal” likely won out over “Mi Camino” due to its deep (arguably crucial) thematic significance, as the lyrics pertain to the damage we can cause by only legitimizing the surface of a person rather than their inner truth.
Saldaña’s Best Supporting Actress win, on the other hand, seemed like a much closer race, especially given the presence of Wicked‘s Ariana Grande, who many had teed up as a favorite for this category. In retrospect, however, it’s really no surprise that Saldaña received the honor; the world of Emilia Pérez demanded that she give herself over to song and dance while still being locked in to the deep emotional drama that permeated the film’s plot. That’s a monumental balancing act to carry out across her character’s lengthy screen time, and the Golden Globes have rightly recognized it as such.
But it’s the film’s pair of Best Motion Picture wins that hold the most remarkable significance in both the awards season sphere and the cultural climate that it’s taking place in. With the Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy win especially (a category, mind you, that was perhaps the most stacked of the whole competition), Emilia Pérez has emerged as one of the major contenders of this awards season, and the implications of what this means for queer storytelling are dizzying.
Emilia Pérez is a fascinating film in the sense that it’s a remarkably realized trans story that’s too ahead of its time for its own good. In the film, we meet Emilia (played by trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón) prior to her transition, and there are instances throughout the film that call back to her pre-transition self (perhaps most notably when her two sons, who don’t recognize her, tell her that she smells “like their papa”).
Emilia goes out of her way to erase her past in the drug cartel scene (and, by extension, the existence of her pre-transition self), and this endeavor informs a key thematic thrust of Emilia Pérez. It advocates for the wholeness of trans identity, and questions whether we’re well and truly fostering trans acceptance if trans people aren’t allowed to safely acknowledge, heal, and own the connection we have with our pre-transition selves. As far as the current cultural climate goes, we simply cannot do that without inviting undue scrutiny onto the fact of our transness/true selves, much like how Emilia cannot safely do that in the film. And, because she can’t do that, a whole new slew of problems is created for her.
And speaking of scrutiny, there is an unignorable danger to having Emilia Pérez be as significant as it is in the awards season sphere right this second. There’s an emotionally nutritious point to having us viewers be acquainted with Emilia’s pre-transition self, as well as having Emilia’s story be so rooted in her past. The nutritiousness of these things, however, requires a cultural vocabulary around the existence of trans people that the overwhelming majority of wide audiences simply do not have. My fear, then — and one that many trans people share — is that people will watch Emilia Pérez and wrongly walk away from it believing that the link between trans women and violent criminals is exactly as prominent as people like J. K. Rowling want you to believe it is.
But then again, there needs to come a point where trans stories become free to swim in the same emotional complexity as their cis counterparts, all without the burden of having to politely prove our humanity to the terminally incurious. And so my hope, as opposed to my fear, is that Emilia Pérez is that very point; a point that just may come to a front with all this award season attention.
Published: Jan 6, 2025 10:17 am