A Trans Woman is Nominated for "Best Actress" - For the First Time in History
By Anne Gregg
Every year, people complain that The Academy Awards is not relevant and does not matter. This is true to some extent because the Academy typically does not award the biggest films at the box office. However the awards do matter for producers and creatives involved in Hollywood. Representation at the Oscars can catapult a marginalized creatives’ careers and help them gain producer’s attention.
This years Oscar’s may, for the first time, nominate a transgender woman in the Best Actress category. Karla Sofía Gascón is a candidate for nomination after her titular role in Emilia Pérez where she plays a former cartel kingpin. While Gascón would be the first trans woman to ever be nominated for an acting award at the Academy Awards, she would not be the first person nominated for playing a trans character.
The Academy Awards has a history of celebrating cisgender people for playing transgender characters. For example, Hilary Swank, a cis woman, was nominated for playing Brandon Teena, a trans man in Boys Don’t Cry. Jared Leto, a cis man, was nominated for playing Rayon, a trans woman in Dallas Buyers Club. Casting cisgender people in transgender roles takes away those roles from trans creatives and silences trans voices. It also suggests that being transgender is a drag performance. When a cis woman plays a trans man, the audience sees a woman playing a man. They do not see a man playing a man.
Emilia Pérez casts a trans woman to play a trans woman, but it does not center her experience or her voice in the narrative. Marginalized identity in Emilia Pérez is a prop, not a facet of a fleshed out three-dimensional character.
Emilia Perez follows lawyer Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) after she is hired to handle a cartel leader, Emilia Perez’s (Karla Sofía Gascón) transition into her life as a woman. Emilia knows if she wants to transition she will have to leave her old life as a cartel kingpin behind. To protect herself and her family from danger she fakes her own death and has Rita secure a safe house in Switzerland for her wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their two kids. Four years later, Rita, now a rich lawyer in London, is reunited with Emilia. Emilia asks Rita to help her bring her family back to Mexico. Emilia cannot bear to be without her children and uses her wealth to ensure Jessi and their children’s safety in Mexico. Jessi does not recognize Emilia and reunites with her lover, Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez). Meanwhile Emilia and Rita start a nonprofit that provides closure to the family members of people Emilia’s cartel killed. Conflict ensues as Emilia’s old life collides with her new one.
Despite Emilia’s centrality to film’s plot, Emilia Pérez is not her story. It is Rita’s. The film begins and ends with her. Rita is the one who sings for trans liberation, for Emilia’s right to live freely. Rita is the one who schedules surgeries for Emilia, chooses the procedures Emilia will have done to her body. The film follows Rita arranging Emilia’s life, not Emilia arranging her own.
Emilia Pérez wants to create sympathy for Emilia, Rita, Jessi, and the women of Mexico but its depiction of oppression and suffering feels more like a news report than a character-driven personal narrative. The script is distant. Actions happen, but the film rarely sits with its characters. It doesn’t allow relationships to build organically between any of its three leads. It does not develop Emilia and Jessi’s reconnection after Emilia’s transition. It does not sit with Emlila while she grapples with the choices she made as a cartel kingpin. Rita does not have an arc. She is angry at the systems that keep marginalized people down and she stays angry and unsatisfied.
Emilia Pérez wants to be too many things: a musical, a thriller, a story that uplifts marginalized voices, a portrait of a complicated trans-woman, a glaring portrait of cartel violence in Mexico. In trying to tell many stories, it fails at telling even one successfully. It wants to be a voice for the voiceless, but instead it colors Mexico as a country of violence and suffering. It wants to show a revolution against a corrupted capitalistic system, but it drops that plotline so the story can end in personal tragedy. It wants to discuss racism towards Rita, but it barrels past that when she gains money. It wants to celebrate transgender women, but it does not take the time to give Emilia personhood.
Despite its flaws, Emilia Pérez’s representation is not solely bad. It is good that Emilia is a flawed character. She is selfish and sometimes violent, but she spent her life before transitioning living up to the expectation of others.. She is allowed to experience friendship, motherhood, and love. Somewhere buried in Emilia Péreztells the story of a transgender woman navigating a new life of freedom while trying to pick and choose parts of her past to carry with her. Unfortunately, that is not the story of Emlia Perez, because this film is not her story Emilia Pérez is not a good film, but its awards buzz and Gascón’s Golden Globe nomination should be celebrated. I hope the hype leads to more work for Gascón and other trans artists and they are offered roles where they get to play three dimensional protagonists. I hope Gascón is not an outlier, and more trans women will have their names and stories talked about in future award show conversations. Trans people deserve to tell trans stories. They deserve the recognition their cisgender contemporaries have acclimated for telling trans stories. They deserve to be celebrated for their talents.
About the Author
Anne Gregg is a poet and writer from Northwest Indiana. She is an English Writing major at DePauw University and is the editor-in-chief of her campus’s literary magazine, A Midwestern Review. She is a Media Fellow at her university and loves dissecting how LGBTQ+ people are portrayed in film and tv.