Emilia Perez: Not Only Bad, But Also Offensive

By Jocelyn Ocampo-Mateo 

Emilia Perez, one of the most controversial movies this Oscar season, and the center of being the most bullied movie this season. The French film, which takes place in Mexico, having both musical lyrics and scenes in Spanish, was quite the hot topic this film season among many movie go-ers. The film starred Karla Sofia Gascón, Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez as its leading ladies. The film follows a struggling lawyer who is met with a cartel drug lord who decides to transition into a woman, the lawyer is then appointed with the job of helping the drug lord start her new life. A fake death is staged and a new life is started but the consequences soon reveal themselves.

While the plot had lots of potential to be an amazing story about female empowerment and just be a story involving crime and drama, the film instead became offensive, distasteful and overall disappointing. The film was also a musical, which meant there were multiple new original songs, all of which were mostly in Spanish. However, the songs were very hard to follow and didn’t seem as though the lyrics followed its own beat. The most insulting part of it all being when in the song “El Mal,” Gascón’s character has some pretty high notes to sing and instead of casting an actress to hit the notes, they used AI instead. The use of AI is like a direct insult to all hard working singers in the entertainment industry and discredits even the actress who it is used on. Come to find out, this isn’t the only controversy Gascón came under. 

In 2020, Gascón sent out racist tweets regarding the Black Lives Matter movement and Goerge Floyd. How these went unnoticed during the casting process, we don’t know. It wasn’t until the category for “Best Actress” nominations came out and Gascón made that list. Shortly after, Gascón deleted the tweets, but the damage had been done, and she made little to no appearance for the rest of awards season.

Emilia Perez has also gone viral online, but for all the wrong reasons. A quick search and you will be able to find countless videos of people criticizing the lyrics and singing in the film, especially of their song that won an Oscar, “El Mal.” People made fun of the film by pointing out the offensive subjects in the film. For example, the whole story takes place in Mexico revolving around Cartels and Cartels and drug lords have been a harmful stereotype of Mexicans for years in both film and real life. 

This movie is clearly far from perfect and the fact it won so many awards this season is questionable and astounding. However, the matter in which the public views the movie, will seemingly never change.