Oscars 2025

Ridgewood, Queens needs a movie theater. Its last one was converted into a Blink Fitness Gym. Documentarian John Wilson of HBO's How To fame is about to open one within a ten minute walk of my home, but his intent seems to be to only show obscure movies in obscure formats on his theater's single screen.

I am still seeing about forty movies and/or TV shows a year, but I am increasingly watching those movies at home and a significant time after their release. Some of this has to do with the lack of a theater within walking distance, some of it has to do with a lack of time because of greater responsibilities. Not an unimportant impediment to watching a lot of movies is the fact that I have much more of a social life than I did when I started writing reviews twenty years ago. That's right, in September 2025, this blog will hit its 20th year anniversary. I'm already thinking of what I will have to say about that. At the top of the list will have to be some sort of explanation as to why I continue to write a blog that next to no-one reads and why, at this point, I'm fairly confident I will never stop doing so. I'm also thinking of re-watching movies I haven't seen in 20 years and writing about that. That plan also requires a decent explanation.

The fact that I am writing reviews of movies I see at home and after a significant delay I don't think immediately affects the quality of the review. (Maybe, I didn't write a Dune 2 review because I felt the in-home experience probably affected my appreciation of the movie). It does however, affect the review's immediate relevance (assuming that it had any relevance to begin with, which is a tenuous proposition). I'm about to write a review about The Penguin, which came out almost a year ago. Much of this has to do with my reluctance to pay a movie ticket price for something I am watching at home. But another reason has to do with simply being late to watch movies in the first place. I spend the first three months of the year catching up on all the well-regarded movies from last year, so as of right now in April, I have barely seen any 2025 movies. So why pay the significant price tag to stream a movie on its opening weekend when I can take advantage of the decreasing price of the movie that came out in January/February that I have not yet seen.

This delay affects the Oscar picks of this year. In particular, three movies that contribute to a sizable amount of my picks may have come out in 2023, not 2024: Godzilla Minus One, All of Us Strangers, and Perfect Days. It isn't actually all that clear to me when these movies came out. I don't recall any of them ever being in any theater and a movie's theatrical release date isn't all that instructive of a movie's general availability nowadays anyway. For example, Godzilla Minus One was notable in that it was nominated for last year's Oscars but could not be seen anywhere at the time of the ceremony, the film being blackballed so that an inferior Godzilla movie could open without undue competition. But since Godzilla Minus One, All of Us Strangers, and Perfect Days were all great movies and I saw them in 2024, I am including them in my picks below. 

It is a good thing too because 2024 was yet another weak year for movies. It was a strong year for TV shows and I feel comfortable saying that even though I have not watched the vast majority of TV programs. I say that because I saw Shogun and that television series is primed to be a high water mark of some kind when we look back at it twenty years from now.

The Oscars Best Picture nominees were an eclectic bunch. Some were downright weird and simply not the sort of movie that the Oscars would normally nominate. This reflects the weak year but also the sort of homogenous groupthink that has a grip over Academy voters. What else explains the presence of Emilia Perez? I wrote at length about its poor taste and dubious morality. Something that escaped my critique, but was all over Mexican critiques, was the fact that the language was poorly translated from French into Mexican Spanish and that almost none of the actors were Mexican. This is something the Academy decided to disregard because the main character was transgender. Or take The Substance a disgusting, albeit effective movie. Imagine if such 1980s horror schlock movies like Evil Dead 2 or The Thing were nominated for Oscars. Apparently, the only thing that was missing from those movies was a feminist bent about women over the age of forty not being as hot as they were in their twenties. When the Academy expanded the amount of Best Picture nominees from 5 to 10, what they really wanted was for movies such as The Dark Knight and Wall-E to be nominated. This year, they welcomed the addition of Wicked and Dune: Part Two to the list. Kudos to the plan. But another unintended consequence is a movie like Nickel Boys, which no one saw and indeed wasn't nominated for anything else besides Adapted Screenplay. The movie was nominated because it is the best "Black" movie of the year, a conspicuous category since 2015 (See American Fiction, King Richard, Blackkklansman, Hidden Figures, Selma).

Then there is the Best Picture winner Anora, which is a great movie but which contains lots of graphic nudity and obscene language. As any reader of my blog can attest to, I love Sean Baker, but I never thought I would see the day when he wins four Oscars in a single night. I'm not sure if that is a sign that out-of-date taboos being cast aside or whether it represents the complete collapse of standards. More than anything else, it probably just signifies a weak year. Sean Baker could no longer be ignored because he was the only one that showed up in 2024.

Best Supporting Actor

Karren Karagulian - Anora

David Jonsson - Alien: Romulus

Guy Pearce - The Brutalist

Edward Norton - A Complete Unknown

Kieran Culkin - A Real Pain

Best Supporting Actress

Geraldine Viswanathan - Drive Away Dolls

Moeka Hoshi - Shogun

Margaret Qualley - The Substance, Drive Away Dolls, Kinds of Kindness

Deidre O’Connell - The Penguin

Felicity Jones - The Brutalist

Best Documentary

n/a

Best Production Design

The Brutalist

Conclave

Dune: Part Two

Nosferatu

Shogun

Best Costumes

Conclave

Dune: Part Two

Gladiator II

Nosferatu

Shogun

Best Hairstyling/Makeup

Dune: Part Two

Nosferatu

The Penguin

Shogun

The Substance

Best Use of Cultural Appropriation

All of Us Strangers - Tokyo Ghosts

The Penguin: Italian Mafia

Perfect Days - Lou Reed, Patti Smith, et al.

A Real Pain: Chopin

The Substance: Stanley Kubrick, 1980s Practical Effects

Best Sound Design

Dune: Part Two

Godzilla Minus One

Nosferatu

Shogun

The Substance

Best Film Editing

All of Us Strangers

Sean Baker - Anora

The Brutalist

Godzilla Minus One

The Substance

Best Original Score

Daniel Blumberg – The Brutalist

Conclave

Flow

Robot Dreams

Shogun

Best Use of a Song

“Always on My Mind” by Pet Shop Boys - All of Us Strangers

“Blue Bayou” by Linda Rondstadt - Drive Away Dolls

“Jean Kayak and His Acme Applejack” - Hundreds of Beavers

“Redondo Beach” by Patti Smith - Perfect Days

“September” Earth, Wind, and Fire - Robot Dreams

Best Original Screenplay

Sean Baker - Anora

A Real Pain

The Brutalist

Perfect Days

Self Reliance

Best Adapted Screenplay

Andrew Haigh, Taichi Yamada - All of Us Strangers

Conclave

Godzilla Minus One

The Penguin

Shogun

Best Visual Effects

Alien: Romulus

Dune: Part Two

Godzilla Minus One

Hundreds of Beavers

Nosferatu

Best Stunt Direction

Anora

The Fall Guy

Hundreds of Beavers

Monkey Man

Shogun

Best Cinematography

The Brutalist

Dune: Part Two

Godzilla Minus One

Nosferatu

The Substance

Best Actor

Andrew Scott - All of Us Strangers

Adrien Brody - The Brutalist

Jesse Plemons - Kinds of Kindness

Colin Farrell - The Penguin

Hiroyuki Sanada - Shogun

Best Actress

Mikey Madison - Anora

Sydney Sweeney - Immaculate

Cristin Milloti - The Penguin

Anna Sawai - Shogun

Demi Moore - The Substance

Best Director

Andrew Haigh - All of Us Strangers

Sean Baker - Anora

Brady Corbet - The Brutalist

Takashi Yamazaki - Godzilla Minus One

Frederick E. O. Toye et al. - Shogun

Best Picture

All of Us Strangers

Anora

The Brutalist

Conclave

Godzilla Minus One

Hundreds of Beavers

The Penguin

Perfect Days

A Real Pain

Shogun

A Very Good Year (Honorable Mention)

Margaret Qualley

Mickey17 (3/5 Stars)

A “Straw Man Argument” is a logical fallacy where an opposite position is distorted into an extreme version and then argued against. Instead of addressing the actual argument, a straw man argument presents a simplified or false version of the opponent’s stance.

Science fiction polemics, by their very nature, are straw man arguments. Because they take place in the future, the proponent gets to lay the groundwork for several hundred (maybe thousands) of years of distortion by making the audience assume that across the vastness of time and space the opposite argument when enacted into policy will naturally result in an inevitable and disastrous slope towards dystopia.

Here, in writer/director Bong Joon-Ho’s newest movie, Mickey 17, we are introduced to a world where the world is beset by environmental destruction and rampant organized crime. The remainder of the human race desperately seeks to leave a doomed Earth for a distant planet. A buffoonish politician (Mark Ruffalo) and his Machiavellian wife (Toni Collette) lay on thick plans of cultish demagoguery for the new settlement, which an utterly naive populace consumes without a hint of critical thought. One especially pitiful creature, Mickey Barnes (played by Robert Pattison) signs up to be an expendable, which apparently is a category of human being that agrees to be cloned for the purpose of suicidal tasks that range from being exposed to radiation, to being a test subject for biological weapons, to being a guinea pig for the development of vaccines. We are introduced to Mickey 17, who provides an elongated voiceover explanation as to the gruesome fate of versions 1-16.

For various reasons that need even more elongated voiceover explanation, this particular spaceship can only have one expendable on it, so Mickey is tasked with every single suicidal task the mission requires. He’s a great help. Indeed by his multiple sacrifices he saves many lives and is hard to imagine the mission succeeding at all without him. You would think these people would be grateful. But they aren’t, because apparently the future is full of shitheads. (Except for the one black woman. Black women, as we all ought to know, are magic negroes imbued with a sense of heightened morality brought upon by the extreme intersectionality of their historic victimhood).  They treat him as if everyone was still in grade school and he came to class with the wrong kind of shoes. I don’t think Mickey Barnes is even being paid.

Would society in the future actually not care about the experience of cloned people? Would we treat them as second class citizens? I ask you, given the world as it is today, why that would be a probable outcome? There have been many science fiction books and movies about cloned people. Can you think of one example where the author isn’t sympathetic to their plight? Do you hear anyone today arguing that clones might be a decent source of cheap slave labor? Wouldn't it be odd if our culture in the 20th-21st Century started out uniformly sympathetic towards clones and then turned with uniformed antipathy against them sometime in the future? And yet, in every single one of these science fiction books and movies, the creator assumes that this will be the case. If there is basically no one with antipathy against clones today, who exactly is Bong Joon-Ho arguing with here?

The answer I don’t think is any one segment of society that actually has antipathy towards clones. I believe Bong Joon-Ho’s argument is against capitalism and he is setting his scene way far into the future to suggest an inevitable outcome of the march of capitalism towards some dystopia where the lives of human beings become valueless in the face of corporations or contracts. It is telling that he wouldn’t be able to make that argument today, since all that has occurred since the introduction of capitalism as a ruling orthodoxy in society (starting say in England circa the Industrial Revolution) is the steady democratization of political power, an exponential rise in the standard of living, and the universal acceptance of human rights, at least in societies that use capitalism. There are still plenty of places that do not have capitalism, and the people there remain slaves to power monopolies. I’m not sure why Bong Joon-Ho, if he is so concerned about the plight of humans, can’t direct a satiric gaze at North Korea, the totalitarian state across the border, where people are treated like animals as we speak, not far off in the distant future.

One of the more influential pieces of culture in the past few years to originate from South Korea was Squid Game, a contemporary story about a group of capitalistic elites (mainly composed of gay texans and at least one Chinese man) pit debt-laden and put-upon South Koreans against each other in fights-to-the-death. Have any of these people ever heard of North Korea? Squid Game could take place there, except of course, for the prize money element.

Mickey 17 draws parallels (and maybe inspiration) from a better movie about science fiction clones. That would be 2009's Moon by Duncan Jones starring Sam Rockwell. That is a much better critique of capitalism. The main difference is that the original Sam Rockwell astronaut sold his genetic material to a corporation and gave them the permission to use and dispose of his clones on a remote lunar base. In that movie, the original guy is sitting at home getting paid for the work his clones are performing. His clones, although expendable and not privy to the truth, are treated with a nominal amount of respect. No one goes out of their way to insult them and the robot on the base is programmed to be helpful. It is a much more interesting take on the subject since it is much closer to an actual moral quandary that someday could occur.

Moon came out in 2009. At the time, it was impressive to see Sam Rockwell interact with himself on screen. In 2025, although I enjoyed the performance of Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17, I am no longer impressed all that much by seeing two of the same actor interact with himself. It’s not all that much of a novelty any longer. It is always nice to see Steven Yeun show up in a movie. It would have been better if he was around longer and was more important to the plot. Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette ham it up as real idiots and that go about doing real stupid things. One wonders how they could ever be put in charge of anything, and then one remembers that this takes place in the dystopic future where everything is possible.

Has it really been six years since Bong Joon-Ho made his previous film, the great Parasite. Do you notice the integral difference between that movie and this one? Parasite takes place in the present day. So, to make it believable, there couldn't be the underhanded straw man cheating that is possible in science fiction movies. Joon-Ho was forced to present characters that would be believable in our time. That constraint made for a much better movie. He should do more of that and, please, more often.

The Brutalist (4/5 Stars)

There are many impressive features of The Brutalist and I want to make sure I mention them up front lest the reader come to the conclusion that I didn’t like watching this movie. I did and I recommend it. I do wonder how much more I could have liked it if I didn’t have an avid personal hatred of the architectural school of design called Brutalism. So let me be positive first and get all the well earned compliments about this movie out in front before I let loose on Brutalism. The movie does have some very good examples of Brutalism, and like all real world examples of the same, they are awful.

The movie is directed by Brady Corbet and written by Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold. It is one of those movies that seem to come out of nowhere. It is not like there is some sort of established demand for movies about architects and Brady Corbet is not an established or productive director. His career is actually mostly acting and only in recent years has he started directing small projects like TV episodes and music videos. You probably haven’t heard of them and even if you had, you wouldn’t expect his next project to be a three and a half hour epic. But here we are, a movie with a pace and length that reminds one of large scale big studio Hollywood movies from the 1950s-1960s. It even has an intermission. Settle down and watch it at home over a weekend. I think it is better broken up into two watching periods, this will give the viewer the opportunity to mull over the first half before watching the second. Both sides of the intermission have their own languid buildup, diverting tangents, climax, and denouement. One can complain about the length, but just compare it to an 8-10 hour television series. This story takes half that time.

The Brutalist is a low budget film, but it doesn’t feel that way. One of its most notable features is a large and expansive original score (the composer Daniel Blumberg just won an Oscar). Same goes with the cinematography that pries distinctive images from everyday events (the cinematographer Lol Crowley just won an Oscar). Same goes with the editing which masterfully overlays different elements of the story and makes the movie feel shorter than it is. The opening is a masterclass in all three of these elements (and acting and directing). It overlays the audio of a spoken letter by a woman in Soviet-held Eastern Europe at the end of World War II with a camera that follows our main character Lazlo Toth (played by Adrien Brody) as he is awakened and makes a minutes-long journey through the interior of a crowded ship. As the man struggles through the belly of the boat, we more and more become apprised of his situation via the context of the written letter. As a Hungarian Jew, he has spent years fleeing the death and destruction of World War II becoming separated from his family and wife in the process. As he exits the interior of the ship, he glances upwards and sees something that transforms his mood from exhaustion to ecstasy. The music swells and the camera wildly veers upwards until we see the Statue of Liberty peeking out from the top of the frame upside down. It is a scene on par with the more classic and straightforward opening of Godfather II. Again, it is notable that It was made for no money, but feels huge. The audience is immediately assured that it is in the hands of people who know what they are doing. That is an especially comforting thought at the beginning of a marathon of a movie.

For whatever reasons, some actors seem destined to play certain types of roles and have become intertwined with their meaning. Adrien Brody has now starred as and won two Oscars playing Eastern European Jews either suffering through the Holocaust (2022’s The Pianist) or making a life in its aftermath 2025’s The Brutalist). These roles are more than twenty years apart but feel like they could be seen one after the other in a double feature. His portrayal of Lazlo Toth is one of mystery and contradiction. He is a gifted architect but has a haunted past and an uncertain present. He is best understood in contrast to his main antagonist, the wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. who picks him up from a coal-mining job and, depending how you interpret this movie, takes pains to employ him, or adopt him, or own him.

Van Buren Sr. is played by Guy Pearce in a strikingly impressive performance. There is a seriousness to this businessman, a capacity for charm and generosity, but something undeniably mean about him. And I’m not just talking about his penchant for making vaguely racist remarks. He’s healthier than you and has more money and commands more respect and it just hurts to be around him. This is one of Guy Pearce’s best performances. It is uncanny how he has grown into the role. Lots of actors get rounder as they age (Russell Crowe?). Pearce’s Van Buren Sr. is as sharp as stone. In comparison, Lazlo Toth is sickly and weak. But Toth has something that Van Buren lacks, a capacity to create and the vision to match it. Van Buren knows this, his jealousy mixes with his disgust for Toth’s inability to escape addiction and post-traumatic stress, until one night in Italy, the relationship culminates in a rape while Toth is preoccupied in a heroin stupor. It is a shocking scene that doesn’t completely work due to the physical logistics of space and time. Instead, it feels more metaphorical and maybe even ideological like the rape scene in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. I don’t know exactly what to make of it, so I won’t speak too much about it. I will say that the first half of the movie also has a scene of unwarranted cruelty that sets in motion the second half of the movie. That too seems ideological. One interpretation is that America is not a place for Jews. That the real homeland is Israel (two other characters make that move), where art and identity do not have to be compromised.

Those are the good parts. Let’s talk a little about Brutalism and what makes it so terrible. The first example of it in this movie is the transformation of a library in the Van Buren Sr. estate. The room doesn’t start well. It’s a bit of a mess with long ugly red curtains lining up across a rotunda of large paned windows looking out onto the gardens. One of the main problems pointed out is that the books are large first editions, so you don’t want sunlight on them directly as it will make them grow old prematurely. The design of Toth deals with this problem by encapsulating the books in large wood cabinets. Here is a picture of the finished product. The lounge chair is also Brutalist.

This looks nice, but I want you to consider how it would actually work as a library in practical terms. That is, if you wanted to use the room as a library, not just pose for pictures in it for Architectural Digest. First, one of the main delights of any library is the ability to peruse the bookshelves for interesting things to read. You can’t do this if the books can't be seen. The design takes the most important part of the room, the books, and removes them. Second, the main purpose of a library is to read books therein. As was mentioned, the books in this library are large first-editions. They are big heavy books. How the hell are you going to read a big heavy book in that lounge chair? That lounge chair is good for magazines and nothing else. Moreover, the ground is barren and hard so you can’t lie on the floor and read a book there either. In order to read anything, you would have to leave the room. This room may look impressive, but in terms of functionality, it is terrible.

Van Buren Sr. is so impressed with the critical raves that his library receives from the high-brow architectural community (Brutalist architecture routinely received design awards in the 1950s-1960s), that he commissions Toth to build him an ambitious community center on a hill on his vast estate. Presumably the community center is to serve the neighboring town of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, although neither Toth nor Van Buren Sr. ever appear to consult the town as to what they want and/or need. Van Buren Sr., not one for details, casually remarks that a community space of some sort is required, and a library because those are nice, and a gymnasium because he did wrestling in high school. At some point someone adds a pool. In order to get the town to chip in financially, they have to add a Christian chapel. Toth expresses surprise that a Christian chapel would be included in a community project, seemingly unaware that churches are society’s most basic communal organization.

Because this is a low budget movie, they couldn’t actually build the Van Buren Institute. The best glimpse we see of it are a small-scale model and certain parts of the inside and outside of the building. It is genuinely Brutalist though. It is giant and made of concrete. It looks like it might be impressive, but here are a few details that the movie (and its characters) do not seem to consider.

One: Location. If this building is to serve the community of Doylestown, why are they building it out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere? How are the people of the community supposed to get to the building to use it?

Two: A big deal is made of the design of the chapel altarpiece. Only the finest marble from Carrera, Italy will be used. The building is designed so that sunlight will filter from an opening in the ceiling so that at certain times of the day, the altar will be illuminated. Okay, that’s cool. But how are people going to see it? From what I can tell, there is no seating in this church.

Three: The gymnasium has a pool which has no natural light and indeed seems to have no artificial light. It appears to be located in the basement where all it could possibly be good for is drowning. The building itself apparently has a multitude of underground passageways. These passages, particularly after hours, would be a convenient place to rob and rape and be robbed and raped. This is not only an ugly design, but also a dangerous one.

All of this is characteristic of Brutalist architecture. The look of the thing, impressive from a distance or in a diorama trumps all considerations of actual utility. Not a single frame in this movie shows the community actually using the community space. We are treated to an epilogue in which the building is praised, Toth is heralded as an uncompromising artist, and we are asked to be impressed by pictures of empty rooms of concrete. The building will last forever, that is true, and it will be a testament to Van Buren Sr. and Toth. But unless it is appropriated by an enthusiastic group of skateboarders, it is likely to remain empty and universally hated by the general populace. If you didn’t consider all the awards it received, it would be a massive failure.

Why is Brutalism so admired in the architectural community? I have a theory that derives from the idea of the comedian’s comedian. In one of the making-of vignette’s of Seinfeld, Larry David is revered as one such comedian, not necessarily because he was the most talented, but that he had very little patience with the audience, going so far as to treat them with outright contempt on some nights when, he felt, they didn’t find his jokes funny enough. Such a comedian inspires courage in his colleagues by pursuing enlightened self-gratification over compromised commercialism. Here Lazlo Toth fits right in. As revealed in the epilogue, the expensive quirks of his masterpiece, the extra high ceilings and the underground passageways, have nothing to do with the community purpose of the project. They are personal memorials to his time in a concentration camp, a secret detail that benefits his ego and will mean nothing to the people of Doylestown. He is a bright beam of inspiration for every megalomaniac that considers people to be no more than those tiny stick figures in their fancy dioramas. When a provocative comedian/writer/artist receives criticism from their work, they can always retort by telling the audience to change the channel. Architecture is different. The people in the area have to experience the building whether they want to or not. It takes a lot of ego to not care about the feelings of other people on such a massive scale. It is no mistake that Ayn Rand chose an architect in The Fountainhead to express her uncompromising philosophy of uncompromising selfishness.

Brutalism isn’t an expression of freedom for all. It is an expression of the architect’s freedom and the general public’s slavery to it. It is not a place to create or to become someone. There is no space for innovation or self-improvement. The forms are rigid and inflexible. It tells the user how things are and insists that they are never going to change. The structures being huge are designed to make humans feel small. The interiors of such places are perfect for prison cells and torture chambers. Its main practical use is to wash the brain and crush the soul. It is the only form of architecture that is routinely improved by graffiti. In 1984, George Orwell described the totalitarian state as a “boot stamping on the face of humanity for all eternity”. And if you wanted an architectural expression of that idea, it is Brutalism.

Having said that, this is a pretty good movie.

Emilia Perez (2/5 Stars)

I’ll give “Emilia Perez” this, it is consistent and it is original. That is, it has a vision and follows it without distraction or compromise. It is a great example of Roger Ebert’s insight about the worst movies being made by some of the best talents. His point was that those who lack skill generally make mediocre movies that inspire neither admiration nor hatred. Those movies are simply boring. It takes great talent to make a great movie. But it also usually takes great talent to make a truly awful movie. Only the best of us have the ability to take a bad idea and unapologetically and unwaveringly run it into the ground. “Emilia Perez” is one such movie.

A movie can be good in two ways. It can be technically proficient, the set can be correctly lit, the sound can be correctly mixed, the makeup can be correctly applied etc. It can also be personally enjoyable: that is, the subject matter can appeal to the personal preferences of the audience. (I never saw last Christmas’s viral hit “Hot Frosty” but I bet the people who watched it were probably pleased with the product without it needing to be all that technically good.) A movie can also be bad in two ways. It can be incompetently made. But a movie can also be technically proficient, but offensive on a personal level. These categories overlap obviously. Most mediocre ones are technically deficient but personally appealing. The last category, technically proficient and bad, is the most rare. Since movies are such a collaborative medium, and are made for people, it is rare that a team of talented people, working well together, make a truly offensive movie.

To illustrate what makes a movie “bad” in the second sense, take the character of Rita Mora Castro, a lawyer played by Zoe Saldana. We are introduced to her as she is preparing the defense of a client that the movie strongly implies murdered his wife by throwing her out of a window. Zoe Saldana does a song and dance (this movie is a musical) in which she uses her legal acumen to thrwart the meanings of words like “love”, “justice”, and “freedom” in favor of someone she knows is guilty. At the same time, she complains and pities herself that her legal talents are not appreciated by her superiors. At no point in this song does Ms. Castro express sympathy for the murder victim.

Movies and television shows are replete with characters of dubious moral nature. But just because a movie is about a bad person, does not mean that the writers/directors/producers of this movie are justifying that character’s behavior. Some of the best cinema about bad people, think Walter White of “Breaking Bad” or Tony Soprano of “The Sopranos”, are made by creators with well honed moral compasses who know exactly why and how bad their characters choices are. That well honed morality lends greatly to the dramatic arc of the story line. The problem with “Emilia Perez” is that it supports its sleazebag attorney. She could be a good person, but she isn’t because she wants money and power. The movie is fine with that and even goes so far as to give her a song and dance at a later time in which she accuses everyone else of being worse. The argument essentially is that her character’s lack of candor and dubious morality is justified because people don’t deserve her integrity. That is offensive. As a lawyer myself, that is specifically offensive to me. Her position and education demand that she hold herself to a higher moral standard, which, at a minimum, means she doesn’t make bullshit excuses like not being able to start her own law firm (where presumably she would be able to practice law without moral compromise) because, and I quote her, she’s black.

Ms. Castro’s efforts in support of the rich and powerful are not ignored though. She is approached by the boss of a drug cartel who wants her to help him fake his own death so that he may engage in a voluminous amount of cosmetic surgery to the end of transforming himself into a woman. The plan, carried out to song and dance, is successful. He fakes his death, abandons his wife and children in the process (he did not bother to seek their counsel about it), and resurfaces from the bandages with, among other things, new skin, new breasts, a new vagina, and a reduction in his adam’s apple. Importantly, he pays for all of this by embezzling money from his drug cartel. Like a lot of money. So although he starts a new life, shorn from the responsibility of running a large organization, he still has all the money and lives his new life as a new woman in luxury in a big house with maids and newly hired goons. Imagine the CEO of the company you're working at doing something like this. Imagine your spouse doing something like this. Imagine your father doing something like this. Imagine a movie not giving a shit about your feelings and instead insisting that you should feel a great joy in this person’s journey of self-actualization.

And it gets worse. This man refers to this decision as if a woman, someone named Emilia Perez, is telling him to do it. And this is another striking example of this movie being tone deaf and in dramatically poor taste. After the transformation, Emilia Perez, feeling sorry for all the mothers of Mexico whose children have been disappeared in the drug wars, starts a non-governmental organization that denounces the cartels that are conducting this orgy of violence, and the corrupt government that allows it. This NGO aids in the retrieval of bodies from mass graves so that these poor mothers can adequately mourn. (This Emilia Perez is quite adept at doing  this because she intuitively knows where the bodies are buried.) The character, and the movie, are under the impression that engaging in a sex-change operation absolves all sins and makes the character a truly different person. Emilia Perez feels no need to turn herself into the police or give back the money she has gained via the blood of innocents. She didn’t commit those crimes. The man did.

There is an old joke about the rich man and his toupee. This egocentric guy, growing old and growing bald, decides to invigorate his looks with some youth by wearing a hair piece. It looks ridiculous and everyone can tell it is fake. But no one says it to his face because he is rich. So he just goes around looking ridiculous ensconced in a delusion that only the wealthy can afford. This is the same with all transgender people who choose to engage in cosmetic surgery. We simply do not have the technology to affect what they desire and, most of the time, they end up in the uncanny valley, approaching something to what they intend to be but obviously, and unsettlingly, not what they intend to be. So, even with all this surgery, which I believe the actor Karla Sofia Gascon actually received (for personal reasons, not for the movie), there is an unspoken dirty little secret that hangs over the movie. Karla Sofia Gascon looks ridiculous and fake. This is clearly a man we are looking at. It says a lot about this movie that it chooses to engage in this pandering sensibility so much so that even in front of all the television cameras that Emilia Perez preens for, not a single person in Mexico recognizes the drug lord. Even her wife (played by Selena Gomez) and children don’t recognize him. Emilia Perez pretends to be a long lost and very rich aunt of the deceased drug boss and no one suspects a thing. It says alot about the Academy that they have decided to sustain this pandering delusion by nominating Karla Sofia Gascon in the category of Best Actress. SHE’S A MAN!

“Emilia Perez” has an ending reminiscent of the one in “The Room”, in which writer/director/star Tommy Wiseau, after dragging us through an awful awful movie, at least unwittingly granted the audience the concession of watching the hated main character commit suicide. “Emilia Perez” provides this same type of relief when we are treated to a large fireball that kills enough people to spare us a sequel. The movie believes the characters are martyrs and that this should be very sad (there is funeral parade in which the poor peasants of Mexico appear to be canonizing the memory of Emilia Perez), but we know they more or less got what they deserved and the scene works as a cleansing purge that washes away much of the repugnant build-up of toxicity and entitlement that came before it. Can this movie become a cult classic at midnight screenings with running commentaries by derisive drag queens? I don’t know, I think it might be too technically proficient of a movie, but maybe. As for the music, well there wasn’t any particular song or melody that stood out as good or distinctly memorable. The dancing was fine I guess. Whether or not the lyrics were eloquent (or even rhymed) is beyond me because I do not speak Spanish.

And now we have to address the elephant in the room here, which is that “Emilia Perez” has been nominated for thirteen Academy Awards, the most of any other movie this year. It could very well be named Best Picture. Although there is a perverse part of me that likes the idea of a movie as original and daring as “Emilia Perez” winning the top prize, I can’t help but imagining that such an honor bestowed would come off with the general populace like the movie itself, tone deaf and in dramatically poor taste. It would be a few notches worse than giving Will Smith a standing ovation after he slapped Chris Rock in the face. I suppose it is hard for certain insular groups to consider the feelings of other people. The Academy is no exception (weird though, since the point of art is to do just that). For political reasons, “Emilia Perez” should be nowhere near the Best Picture race. Maybe their high-priced attorneys can explain this to them in such a way that it doesn’t unduly hurt their feelings. If the Academy wants to be daring, it can bestow the prize on “Anora”, a movie that presents with clear eyes how the delusional entitlement of very rich people affects the rest of us. Or the Academy can be safe and honor whatever this year’s version of “Green Book” (“Wicked”, anyone?’). Almost everything we do is political and certainly at this level with so many millions of people watching. We just experienced a political election in which a manifestly defective nominee just won the popular vote. One can sit back like Ms. Castro and complain about other people, or one can take stock in this simple reality: that the American people looked at Donald Trump and then the alternative and then, after ruminating about the choice for many many months, decided that the alternative was worse. The way to get back is to get better.