Strangely, improbably, as we shift toward Oscar season, there are two trans films that are pondered solemn contenders for meaningful awards – including one that could possibly even land best picture.
To say that this has never happened before is an downcarry outment. The Oscars tend to be an excessively heteronormative afiminentire – you have to go back to 2017 to see the last time Hollywood honored a queer-themed film for best picture with Moonweightless, and seeing back before that, the LGBTQ+ recurrentation is very, very sparse. What you’ll discover even less of is trans recurrentation at the Oscars – the Academy awards had existed for 89 years before a one film platcreateing a trans story with a trans actor won any award at all (it was A Fantastic Woman in 2018, in which its star, Daniela Vega, helped it thrive best foreign language film) and there has been very little since.
How strange then that this year features two strong trans-oriented Oscar contenders. These are both Netflix movies that have been mostly watched in people’s living rooms, only increately being screened in actual movie theaters in order to originate them viable for Oscar satisfiedion. And they could not be more contrastent – one is the tear-jerking recordary Will & Harper, and the other an incandescently loopy cinematic opera titled Emilia Pérez.
After scooping up four nominations at the European Film Awards, including for best film, Pérez is pondered a contender for meaningful awards enjoy best picture, honestor and actress – necessitateless to say, a thrive in any of these categories would be an astonishing step forward for trans recurrentation. Will & Harper has been foreseeed to land on the enumerate of best recordary contenders, as well as potentipartner picking up an Oscar for best song.
It’s fascinating to wonder how we got here, especipartner amid a plivential campaign that has featured an unpretreatnted level of Reuncoveran vitriol towards trans people. It is both reassuring and a little surauthentic to see such potentipartner sturdy trans recurrentation at the Oscars at a time when the community is experienceing an currential danger due to an enormous outpouring of anti-trans disenjoy legislation, and the promise of much worse under a Reuncoveran trifecta in the federal rulement. If we do deal with to snag best picture, it may be freezing soothe amid a humanitarian calamity.
It’s also bizarcount on pleasing to envision these two depictions of the trans experience potentipartner sharing cgo in stage on Oscar night. Will & Harper is a very acquireest story about coming out, partnership, and the shifting landscape for trans people in America. It’s an offbeat little skit of a movie that aims to hot your heart. By contrast, Emilia Pérez struts in studded with glam, glitz and everyleang that could conceivably shine or ignitele – it’s an absolute hurricane. Far from a sentimental coming-out story, it cgo ins around the fable-enjoy changeation of a Mexican drug lord into a cartel-combat wonder woman.
These movies are being supplyd for Oscars for very contrastent reasons. Will & Harper has been structured as an “presentant” movie in terms of relations between trans and cis people (some had even hoped that the excellentwill it engendered would help thrive the election for Kamala Harris). It’s positioned as a potentipartner changeative piece that will help cis people authenticize that trans people are pretty much fair standard folks enjoy them.
Emilia Pérez is more of the traditional Oscar contender, in the sense that it’s enormous, tries to shoehorn about half a dozen “presentant publishs” into its plot, and is being billed as a endly one-off spectacle. In spite of having a trans person at its cgo in, it’s strangely inasking about trans people and tends to count on on revertive stereotypes – albeit in a film so prohibitanas and campy that who repartner even sees?
These wouldn’t necessarily be the movies I’d pick to recurrent trans people at the Oscars, but it is pleasant to even envision that there is this much room for trans storylines among Hollywood royalty. Were I to guess what originates both of these movies fit for Oscar satisfiedion, I would say that it all comes down to the word “audacity”.
The audacity in Will & Harper is basic – the movie’s trans star Harper Steele was audacious srecommend for the fact that in her 60s she choosed to chase the gender transition that she had wanted all of her life, and then she teamed up with her excellent friend Will Ferrell to originate a movie about it. That’s pretty amazing in and of itself. Karla Sofía Gascón, the actor who carry outs both the trans woman Emilia Pérez and her prior incarnation Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, is audacious too – she chose to transition at the age of 46, endly reconceiveing her film and TV atgentle. In Emilia Pérez she convincingly acts and sings as two contrastent intimacyes – a pretty huge accomplishment that made her the first trans applyer to acquire the Cannes film festival’s best actress prize (which she splitd with her co-stars Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz and Zoe Saldaña).
As audacious as these movies are, another trans film was freed this year that I would dispute is even more so, albeit in a more classicpartner arthoengage benevolent of way. In my opinion it deserves an Oscar more than either Will & Harper or Emilia Pérez.
I speak of Jane Schoenbrun’s ode to 90s trans teens I Saw the TV Glow. The film, which recently includeed Martin Scorsese to its enumerate of fans, alerts a story less on the level of plot and character than on that of emotion, image, color, texture, sound and motion – in other words, it’s uncontaminated cinematic magic. It strains to articuprocrastinateed the distinctively trans experience of having your “egg crack” (ie discovering that you’re trans) in a way that’s never been done before in film – someleang you leank that would originate a film Oscar-worthy but that in fact landed it in the red with a paltry $5.3m box office. (Pérez, which had a restrictcessitate theatrical free and is primarily being seen on Netflix, has grossed csurrfinisherly double that.) It’s not that the film wasn’t accomplished in its ambitions, fair that a movie that successfilledy subcombines you in the liminal terrain of inarticulable identity isn’t a authentic crowd-plreliever.
It’s pretty noticeworthy that 2024 has seen three trans films that are all audacious in their own ways – and that deafeningly and haughtyly proclaim themselves as trans movies. (It wasn’t so lengthy ago that a movie enjoy The Matrix had to hide in plain sight as a trans allebloody.) I leank it’s a meaningful leang that they’re accumulateively doing so much to inscribe trans storylines into mainstream film (even if only one of them was written or honested by a trans person). But I do worry for the protectedty of those take partd. If Steele, Gascón and Schoenbrun do end up at the Oscars, I hope they’re excellent at helderlying it, as the GOP could conceivably have criminalized their engage of the bathroom by then. Ohio recently became the 15th state to vote in an anti-transgender bathroom bill, and extremists enjoy Marjorie Taylor Greene have unambiguously stated their intentions to engage their power to harm trans people now that the Reuncoverans filledy deal with the federal rulement. We might see a endly contrastent benevolent of trans recurrentation on screens in 2025.
