emilia pérez continues to astound

(derogatory)

It's a little funny that I wrote about Emilia Pérez at the beginning of this month and nearly every day since, the film’s promotion has done something to upset me even more. Like. That's impressive?

If you missed it, here's what I wrote back when I naïvely believed January had potential:

But instead, we’re wasting time discussing French-written, French-directed, and French-produced Emilia Pérez, frankly one of the worst movies I have seen in the last decade that people are trying to gaslight me into believing is a revelatory treatise on both the Mexican and the trans identities.

In its infinite wisdom, the Academy did not read Hmm That’s Interesting and thus decided to grant a whopping 13 Oscar nominations to Emilia Pérez, including one for Best Picture and one for Best Actress for Karla Sofía Gascón.

Let’s put this number in perspective: Oppenheimer last year received 13 nominations; The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, a movie my brother (correctly) makes me rewatch once a year, received 13 nominations in 2001; Chicago, in which Catherine Zeta-Jones made a historic case for The Bob, earned 13 nominations in 2002; Mary Poppins, whose VHS learned to cower whenever I walked into Blockbuster from approximately 1999-2001, received 13 nominations in 1964.

And then there's Emilia Pérez, a movie whose director said in a French interview that "Spanish is a language of modest countries, developing countries, of poor people and migrants." You can't be French and be talking like this. You can't be French, bald, trying to win an Academy Award for a bad movie, and be talking like this.

(Today (Jan. 31) is the last day of the 20% discount off annual subscriptions, by the way. Starting tomorrow, they’ll be back at $50/year. Thank you to everyone who’s upgraded in the last couple of months!)