January 24, 2025 22:29 IST
Date first published: January 24, 2025 19:28 IST
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How did a movie like Emilia Perez’s, say, do in the 1992 awards season? That year, The Silence of the Lambs dominated the Big 5 Academy Awards, winning Best Picture, Best Director ( The film won Best Actor (Anthony Hopkins), Best Actress (Jodie Foster), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Ted Tully). . In the 30-odd years since, The Silence of the Lambs has lost some of its reputation, going from being a “thinking moviegoer’s horror” to a movie with undeniably great elements, including Hopkins and Foster, background music, and dialogue. I’ve changed, but I’m still fighting transphobia. And here in 2025, the answer to the opening question becomes clear. Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, the story of a Mexican drug lord who transitions into his true identity as a woman, would have gone largely unnoticed. It received a record 13 nominations at this year’s Academy Awards alone.
In that sense, the world has come a long way in terms of the kinds of stories we want to tell and hear. In another sense, the kind that often has brutal real-world consequences that are discouraging, we either stay where we are or we go backwards. Life doesn’t go from scene A to scene B to scene C like a plot. There is no coherent narrative. But if that happens, it might draw a line between the executive order signed this week by President Donald Trump revoking the official recognition of more than one gender and Emilia Perez’s impressive sweep of Oscar nominations. I don’t know. Is Hollywood thumbing its nose at the establishment even as other great American industries like Silicon Valley bow down before it?
But the stories we tell ourselves matter, as actor Demi Moore so astutely observed in her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes earlier this month, in which she talked about her 40-year career. He won the trophy for Best Actor for the first time. For a long time, she believed – in fact, she told herself – that she would never be recognized for her talent as just a “popcorn actress.” Everything changed when she stopped believing in that story and wrote a new one herself. At 62 years old in an industry that is notoriously ageist and sexist, she still had something valuable to contribute.
The film, The Substance, for which Moore received an acting nomination, is itself part of a larger story likely to unfold at this year’s Academy Awards. If Emilia Pérez’s recognition (starring Carla Sofia Gascón is the first transgender person to be nominated for an Oscar) marks a new chapter in Academy Awards history, it’s in line with several other nominees. This field will be shared. Scattered across different categories. Anora is about a sex worker’s attempts to get her own fairy tale. The Substance is a body horror film that skewers ageism and sexism in the glamor industry. Wicked is a sumptuous musical firmly rooted in the transformative friendship between two women. And The Girl With The Needle is a historical horror story (based on a true story) about women we never see and the terrible choices they are often forced to make. These are stories of struggle and celebration, of female bonds and appetites, stories of alienation that go back centuries and don’t seem to end in any meaningful sense for at least another few decades (an optimistic take, I say). There may be some people).
Hollywood awards like the Golden Globes, Emmys, and Oscars (especially the Oscars) are often dismissed as self-congratulatory accolades given to themselves year after year by an industry that loves to reflect on itself. And that reflection has typically been cis male, white, and straight, even as the industry itself has historically morphed into something less well-known and more relatable. So for anyone who cares about movies and the realities they borrow from and shape, it’s exhilarating to feel like you’re witnessing a perhaps historic Oscar Awards. At the same time, it’s disheartening to acknowledge that mere nominations feel like progress — who remembers the other nominations in the category dominated by Silence of the Lambs in 1992? The Academy, which boldly nominated transgender actors in major acting categories and made sure that women’s stories weren’t crowded out again this year, somehow managed to find only one woman nominated for Best Director once again. (Coralie) Fargeat, The Substance) — trying to make history. If scene A fades out, can we move on to the only scene that matters?
pooja.pillai@expressindia.com
