The road to the 97th Academy Awards has become nothing short of controversial with its lack of queer representation in its nominated films. This time around, I have become frustrated with the small number of the Academy’s choice of nominees.
To start, the Netflix film Emilia Pérez was nominated 13 times, including for Best Picture and Best International Film. While the film includes transgender characters and a transgender actress, I believe that it still cannot take the award home for the best queer representation in cinema for the year 2024.
Emilia Pérez was released in November of 2024 and stars transgender actress, Karla Sofía Gascón, as the title character. In a poorly conceived plot, Gascón plays a transgender Mexican cartel leader who hires a lawyer to help her find a surgeon for her gender affirming surgery. She then calls on Rita, played by Zoe Saldaña, to help her fake her death in order to continue living her life as a woman named Emilia Pérez. The film then takes a turn and shifts into a crime thriller as Pérez finds justice for the victims of the cartel. However, the film fails to mention the inherent irony as to how Pérez was a major cartel boss before her transition (but that is neither here nor there).
It should be firstly noted that there are people in the transgender community who may relate to Pérez’s character, as well as that the title character of the film is played by a transgender actress of color. Her character represents someone who has the power and resilience to go out and make a difference in other people’s lives despite the hardships she is faced with. Furthermore, the film does a great job in representing queer relationships — Pérez has a serious relationship with a woman in the film, which is a rarity in media for trans woman characters.
Despite all of this, Emilia Pérez still falls into harmful tropes that could have been avoided by the writers, director, or even Netflix. Although this film has a new take on the trans experience, its number one problem is that it uses the same trans tropes that are regressive in 21st century film making. And honestly, trans people are tired.
Before her transition, Pérez is seen as a hard, evil, malicious drug lord who is ruthless. Yet seamlessly after her transition, she is seen as someone who is soft, kind, and has “finally” found human decency and generosity. Pérez believes that to truly become the person she wants to be, she must kill her old self and be rebirthed into her new skin.
Another fault in her story is that she decides to leave her wife and children in order to transition. She attempts to reenter their lives as her wife’s “friend” or “sister” when she could have been honest with her family about the transition she is going to make. Acceptance from friends, family, and peers is something that deters many queer and transgender people from coming out, and Pérez’s acceptance into her own womanhood is regrettably depicted as very shallow and unfocused.
Writer Ameilia Hansford, a trans journalist, states in a piece from Pink News, “Emilia Pérez is primarily a film about being reborn, and it tries to use the idea of transitioning to convey that through her transition, Emilia is trying to repent for the sins she committed in her time as cartel boss. The issue with this is that transition isn’t a moral decision, and the act of transitioning alone doesn’t somehow absolve you of your past self. It isn’t a death, nor is it a rebirth.
“Instead, Emilia continues to use contacts from the cartel, manipulates her family into trusting and spending time with her, becomes physically aggressive near the film’s ending when reconnecting doesn’t pan out, and even opts to threaten her wife, played by Selena Gomez, with financial blackmail.
“None of this is framed in a way that makes any thematic sense and ends up showcasing Emilia as yet another psychopathic trans character to add to the pile.”
With several of the nominations going to Emilia Pérez, this Oscars award season failed to mention two other incredible films that were released this past year. The film Challengers revolves around a love triangle between two male tennis players, played by Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, and a female tennis player played by Zendaya. The director, Luca Guadagnino, is known for exploring sexuality and queer themes in his films. His work focuses on the homoerotic dynamic between the male characters, even if their relationship isn’t explicitly labeled as “gay” and the characters don’t need to come out.
The film only won one Golden Globe for Best Original Score and received no Oscar nominations. The film has an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes and uses sex, love, and intimacy to offer a nuanced take on queerness that does not need to be explicit. The film leans into queerness through tension, body language, and subtext and goes beyond heteronormative male friendships. In multiple scenes, the two lead characters, Patrick and Art, are put in positions that tease how their relationship is more than just competitive banter.
Challengers was not the only film released by Guadagnino this year. He also released a film titled Queer, which is based on the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by William S. Burroughs. Set in the 1950s, Queer follows an American expatriate in Mexico, William Lee (played by Daniel Craig), as he struggles with addiction and unfulfilled desires. He becomes obsessed with the young Eugene Allerton (played by Drew Starkey), a man who does not necessarily reciprocate the same feelings Lee has.
The story explores themes like longing, repression, self-destruction, and existential questioning. Unlike Challengers, which plays more with ambiguity, this film directly confronts queer desires and alienation, especially in a time when these relationships were far from accepted. This film is raw and visually stunning and has emotionally intense scenes that portray the intimate feelings of queerness.
Similarly to Challengers, this film received no nominations from the Academy for this year’s Oscars. I believe that Queer did not receive the promotion that it deserved, which could have made it a real contender for this year’s Oscars.
While queer themes have become more mainstream, the Academy still favors “safe” queer narratives, over darker, more challenging ones and even playful, fast-paced films. Ultimately, while progress has been made in terms of LGBTQ+ representation at the Academy Awards and by the Academy, there is a consistent exclusion of films that depict queerness in more experimental, subversive, and playful ways. This lapse in representation suggests that there is still a long way to go before all forms of queer storytelling receive the proper recognition they deserve.