Is ‘Emilia Pérez’ emerging as the villain of awards season? Here’s what that means.

As frontrunners emerge in contention for the Oscars, this season’s villains are also taking shape. One movie is rising to the top, racking up Golden Globe wins and SAG Award nominations as well as ill will from some critics: Emilia Pérez.

What does it mean to be a villain in a competition among films? As Bobby Finger wrote in 2018, it began as a personal tradition of “picking a least favorite movie and dumping on it so hard for five long months, to the point that I condition myself into perceiving the movie not only as a piece of utter shit, but as my sworn enemy, the cultural artifact I hate most, my cinematic kryptonite.”

Over the years, several movies have emerged as villains, appearing to be widely hated online yet racking up awards and nominations, just like Emilia Pérez is now. Past villains include 2018’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; 2019’s Green Book, 2022’s CODA and 2024’s Maestro.

There are many reasons why certain films might be considered villains, and those reasons are all indicated by online buzz. Sometimes, like in the cases of Three Billboards and Green Book, the movies are perceived by some as trying to signal virtue, but they instead fall short, shoehorning reductive narratives into something advertised as open-minded. Both movies ultimately won the Oscar for Best Picture.

As Alissa Wilkinson wrote about Three Billboards, which follows a woman who’s fed up with the criminal justice system in her town and takes on a racist cop, “when the movie started screening outside the festival circuit weeks later, what had looked like consensus between both audiences and critics began to crumble.” In small, exclusive circles where films are initially screened and earn awards that generate buzz for the general public to get excited about. But the public doesn’t always receive those films well, igniting chatter and backlash online.

Sometimes the hate is less nuanced. Maestro’s director, producer and star Bradley Cooper was perceived as a try-hard who wanted so to win an Academy Award, it was obvious. The film was nominated for seven Oscars but won none of them.

Some films are hated for being too pretentious, but others are hated for not being pretentious enough. CODA, a movie about the only hearing member of a deaf family who has aspirations of becoming a singer, was panned as too feel-good and a “glorified Lifetime movie.” It won Best Picture.

Emilia Pérez appears to be the villain of the 2025 awards season. It’s a Spanish-language musical crime comedy from French director Jacques Audiard that follows a Mexican lawyer who helps a notorious cartel boss transition into living as a woman — the titular Emilia Pérez. Over the course of the film, Pérez goes to extreme lengths to atone for her past actions and to reunite with the children she left behind. It stars Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón and Selena Gomez.

Like other villains before it, Emilia Pérez was lauded by festival cinephiles but didn’t make a huge splash among the general public. It made waves at Cannes in May, but when it landed on Netflix in November, it never topped the streaming service’s movie charts. It has generally favorable reviews with a 76% score on Rotten Tomatoes and has won dozens of accolades, including Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes.

As the film has racked up awards, the backlash has been mounting, as well. Some points of critique include the exclusion of Mexican actresses in the movie’s main cast, the performance of an actress who isn’t fluent in Spanish in a Spanish-speaking role and concerns that Mexican culture was overlooked by the film’s French director.

GLAAD criticized the film in a lengthy op-ed for using the protagonist’s transgender identity as a redemption arc, calling it “profoundly retrograde.” Other critics in The Cut, Pink News and Them shared similar concerns. A musical number from the film about the medical procedures involved in gender confirmation surgery has been going viral for months on X.

The discussion of Emilia Pérez reached its peak after its Golden Globes win — with roughly a week remaining for Oscars voters to get their ballots in for nominations. Whether its newly minted villain status ruins its chances or makes it the one to beat at the Academy Awards remains to be seen.

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