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How Best Picture Nominees Like ‘Conclave’ and ‘Emilia Perez’ Feel Different Under a Trump Presidency
Post-election season, Academy Award contenders like "Wicked" and "Emilia Perez" feel different under a Trump presidency and perhaps even more timely.
Centered on the matriarch Eunice Paiva (best actress nominee Fernanda Torres), the film both puts the brutal facts of a totalitarian regime on merciless display, and aims to preserve a nation’s historical memory for generations to come, as a piece of evidential artifact on how horrifying things used to be. Those may no longer be the film’s legacy, but a mainstream Oscar nominee’s prominent embrace of the trans identity feels important in a broad sense, especially in the wake of Trump’s executive order declaring that there are just two sexes, male and female, rejecting that people can transition from one gender to another or nonbinary. In the former, seen entirely through the first-person eyes of its main characters in a way that redefines cinematic language and confronts a period in U.S. history with an uncompromisingly Black lens, Ross attentively adapts Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel, constructing a perceptive narrative on the racism of the Jim Crow South.
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