Full box for Emilia Perez, cited thirteen times in the list of Oscar nominations, including the most exposed categories: best film, best director, best actress (for the Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón), best actress in a supporting role (Zoe Saldana), best film in foreign language, best adaptation, editing, sound… Don’t throw any more away. The record of The Artist in 2012 stood at ten nominations. The silent film by Michel Hazanavicius left with five statuettes. In 2024, nominated in five categories, Anatomy of a fall by Justine Triet won best original screenplay. With five nominations (including best film and director), Coralie Fargeat is the other French woman in sight, placing Demi Moore’s plastic convulsions in The Substance, co-production between France, England and the United States, in a very good position. It is obviously also a plebiscite for the choices of Thierry Frémaux at the Cannes Film Festival who had in competition as well Emilia Perez what The Substance, as well as the six nominations for the Palme d’Or, Anora by Sean Baker.
It is at least a new coup for Jacques Audiard, 72 years old, whose career is marked by numerous awards. Thirty years exactly after his César for best first film in 1995 for Watch the men fall, the filmmaker managed to both explore obsessive themes (mostly the father-son relationship in his beginnings) while reinventing himself with each film, occupying a special, very special place in the landscape of French cinema from his beginnings to production. preoccupied and focused on the question of genre film when most of the authors then heirs of the New Wave tried to change the situation by being who the new Truffaut, Rohmer or Godard. Three Caesars for On my lips, eight for My heart stopped beating, new for A prophet after winning the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, four Césars for Of rust and bone (which will have almost 2 million admissions in theaters), he won a Palme d’Or in 2015 with Dheepan. Son western, the Brothers Sisters in 2018 won a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and a César for Best Director.
True fascination with the figure of cracked heroes
However, Audiard took time before projecting himself into the shoes of a filmmaker, and even more so of international fame. “I imagined myself as a writer or philosopher. If I became someone it would be Maurice Blanchot. he will tell. Son of the star of killer dialogue, Michel Audiard, he ended up co-signing with the latter the screenplay for Deadly Hike by Claude Miller with Michel Serrault and Isabelle Adjani in 1983, a story of a dead child written in a bereaved parentage report – François Audiard, the son and older brother was killed in a car accident in 1975. Jacques Audiard will come next ten years of chaining together scenarios such as Bag of knots by Josiane Balasko, Grosse Fatigue by Michel Blanc or Venus Beauty (Institute) by Tonie Marshall. He made his first film, Watch the men fall, but had a very difficult time filming: “I didn’t like it at all. I wanted to stop at that moment. […] I didn’t have the directing experience at all as I imagined it would. I found it detestable.” He who will attack a film lastingly associated with a real fascination for masculine universes and the figure of cracked heroes, exploring the world of crooked real estate agents or mobsters and other jailbirds claims to have left the set, exasperated by teams of relous technicians : “I have always loathed masculine societies,” he readily says in various interviews. In 2009, again: “Manhood is only interesting when it collapses. If one thing horrifies me, it’s assertive virility.”
You had to dare to cut off Marion Cotillard’s legs in Of rust and bone or make a Sri Lankan janitor from the ranks of the Tamil Tigers the central figure of Dheepan. When we see Emilia Perez, it’s the same incredulity about its ability to make projects that are a priori unsellable possible – a musical comedy about the gender transition of a former Mexican drug baroness who becomes a saint and all of that filmed without Mexicans in the Paris suburbs! – which brings together cinema professionals on its case, whether they like the film or not.
-Netflix Firepower
The least we can say is that the renewal of the Academy’s college for more diversity favors a cinema that is not exclusively American, but no one in the United States has yet appeared to be moved by a reception on the American side. Latin, and particularly in Mexico, much more mixed: “I don’t remember an artistic work having created such controversy in Mexico, and yet we love scandals,” said to Liberation Mexican journalist and producer Susana Moscatel. The promotional tour in Mexico was stormy with Jacques Audiard led by a communications firm telling him to be humble, respectful and modest in a country all the more on edge since their sworn enemy, Donald Trump, was re-elected.
We will see on the night of March 2 to 3 how many awards Audiard wins, knowing that it has already won four Golden Globes and that it benefits from the firepower of Netflix, its American distributor. The intense and exhausting Oscar campaign against the backdrop of a burned-out Los Angeles therefore begins for him and his teams.
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